Pear the Cultivator

[rvm45]

Friends,

This is the first chapter of "Pear the Cultivator."

I have ten chapters written so far. I'm not satisfied with it, but I've given up on tinkering with it.

It doesn't measure up to the standards of the Cultivating Genre or to my better work. Nonetheless, it is something that some of you may enjoy.

I'll be posting a chapter every few days. I think that it needs one or two chapters to wrap things up. I may not ever get around to wrapping it up—but then again…

If you like the story, you'd better save it. PAW is the best so far as taking stuff down when it gets published. Honestly, I never could get any of my stories promoted by Amazon, because I could never get all of the free copies taken down.

If I manage to wrap it up well I will post the final chapter or two for a week or so and then take it down.

I don't suspect that my story will get selected for the free sample program, but then again, you never know.

{Even if I don't add to it—it is largely sewn up by the last chapter that I've written.}

O yeah, this is the only Forum where this will appear.



Pear the Cultivator




Chapter One






Six-year-old Pear had watched his uncle perform his sword flourishes and katas any number of times. Ballroom dancing was unknown in Pear’s world, but Uncle Jared’s agile gliding movements were similar to dance.

Jared had started life as a jester—commonly called a “fool.” Jesters needed to be excellent storytellers and bards. They also needed to be accomplished at tumbling, juggling and sleight of hand.

For the most part though, jesters were noted for their biting social commentary. The nobles and the rich needed a handle on what the proletariat was thinking and hearing their grievances aired eased the working class—even when it was done in satire.

No one was supposed to take offense at a jester’s words because a jester was—by definition—a fool.

A prince had taken offense to some comments by Jared’s father though, and he’d ordered his retainers to beat the man to death.

Jared hadn’t been a warrior then, but he had excellent strength, flexibility and agility and that given him a good head start.

Jared’s act had contained some skilled juggling and throwing of knives. Throwing knives was flashy, but in the real world—for those who believed in “reality”—it wasn’t a terribly useful tactic.

The trouble was that the prince always travelled with many bodyguards. It was very difficult to get closer than 20-yards from him. The prince also routinely wore a short-sleeved mail shirt.

Jared had harvested the venom of a number of purple tarantulas and refined a thick venomous salve that he smeared on all of his throwing knives. So long as the prince was cut anywhere on his body, he’d die horribly.

He took thirty-six throwing knives with him the day that he’d gone after the prince. He didn’t expect to live long enough to throw anywhere near all of his knives, but it wouldn’t be happy making to fall short.

He’d had time for five throws at a distance close to 30-yards. He’d thrown five knives and hit the prince three times—in the back of his neck, across one cheek and deep in one forearm.

When the prince collapsed, Jared threw most of the rest of his knives at the prince’s bodyguards. Perhaps the guards were only doing their job when they protected the prince. Jared had always believed that people who meant well, or who were “only doing their job,” were far worthier of contempt and hatred than those who wholeheartedly embraced evil.

Against all expectation, Jared had survived and escaped. He’d learned the sword as he travelled ever farther southward and eventually he’d earned the title “Grandmaster” after having won many death duels with other masters.

Then Jared had met Pear’s aunt. The mundane seldom married shape shifters, but it wasn’t taboo. Even if it had been, few would have dared to call Jared to task over it. Jared had settled down and forsaken the dueling path.

************ ************** ************************

“Teach me the sword,” Pear had pleaded.

“You are a bear person. When you’re grown you’ll be able to shift into a wirehair grizzly weighing 2500-pounds or more, and you won’t even be able to grasp a sword in your bear form,” Jared had argued.

There were several bear tribes and each tribe shifted into a different species of bear. The various tribes weren’t at war with each other, but there was no great feeling of solidarity between them either.

Wirehair grizzly had six-inch metallic guard hairs—sharp enough to cut like concertina—and they were as good for armor as top quality charmed chainmail.

“Why do you want to learn the sword?” Jared had quizzed Pear.

“Because it’s beautiful,” Pear said.

Jared had learned the sword as a survival skill while being hunted. Only later had he vaguely sensed an underling beauty and harmony. He had a deep reverence for those who studied the sword for purely aesthetic reasons—though impractical and flowery swordsmanship had no beauty so far as Jared was concerned.

Jared’s sword method stressed using the sword in the “weak” hand—the left hand for right handers. The left hand ceased being weak after the many arm, wrist and finger strengthening exercises Jared prescribed.

He also paired a buckler with a saber.

Shields were a grievous burden to be borne and unless one was on his way to war, few would carry them.

Hands and fingers were a vital target in sword fights. Once the sword hand was cut off—or even seriously wounded—cripples were easy to kill. Also, the sword hand was generally the closest thing to the client.

Only the fact that the hand was small and generally in motion kept the sword hand from being effectively targeted even more often than it already was. Also, an experienced fighter held his hand back unless he was actually attacking or parrying.

Western style sabers—as well as a few straight-bladed swords—protected the sword hand with a fairly elaborate basket hilt. The basket hilt became a weapon in its own right at close quarters—better than a set of brass knuckles.

Bucklers looked like a small dinner-plate sized shield, but they weren’t used the same way as a shield was. The buckler was intended to “shade” the sword hand almost all of the time. That is, to protect the sword hand from cuts and to hide the sword hand from view.

Sometimes an opportunity to slam the buckler into the client’s face presented a tempting free shot though.

A buckler seemed redundant for a saber user, but since Jared’s hand was already well protected by the basket hilt, Jared freely used the buckler as a saucer-shaped mace—but only occasionally when it wasn’t expected. He also held a triangular bladed mercy dagger with a blade long enough to protrude about four inches below the edge of the buckler.

The ancient Scots often did this with a targe and dirk, but most bucklers had a rigid metal grip that prevented grasping a dagger in addition to the buckler’s handle. Jared’s bucklers were custom made with a thick but flexible leather strap for a handle.

Of course, left-handed sabers and custom bucklers weren’t always on hand so Jared’s system also stressed versatility.

Pear was Jared’s first student, but after thinking it over Jared decided to open a small school of swordsmanship—small enough that he could teach his few students in the larger courtyard of Pear’s parent’s house.

************ ************** *******************

Jared had thirteen students—some of them adults, and a couple were city guards. Thirteen-year-old Pear was the most skilled of all of them.

Pear and two other students had been presented with medallions that proclaimed that they were masters of the sword. The medallion—though a good touch—was not essential. The acknowledgement of a grandmaster or alternatively, at least three masters, was.

“Master” was a title that recognized skill and dedication. The “Grandmaster” title was reserved for those who had experienced life and death combat a number of times.

“I’m proud of you,” Uncle Jared told Pear as he gave him the medallion.

That was one of Pear’s proudest moments.

************* ************** **********************

“What are you doing when you sit cross-legged for hours on end?” Pear asked.

“I’m cultivating,” Jared said.

“I thought that cultivators sat in a lotus position,” Pear said.

“I can cultivate suspended upside-down from the ceiling. Positions aren’t crucial,” Jared replied.

“Can you teach me to cultivate?” Pear asked.

“You don’t have a dantian. Any number of mundane lack a dantian as well as most shape shifters,” Jared said.

“What is a dantian?” Pear asked.

“A dantian is a semi-real thing. You will never see one during an autopsy. You wouldn’t even see one if you vivisected someone. It exists in a sort of nether space. Novels love to use the destruction of someone’s cultivation as a dramatic plot device, but in truth, it isn’t easy to destroy. Not only do you have to strike the dantian area hard, you also have to send a pulsed burst of qi at the precise frequency into the body,” Jared explained.

“So, if someone doesn’t have a dantian, they can’t cultivate?” Pear said.

“Not exactly.”

Jared went into his room and returned with an old and voluminous book. The book’s title was:

“Cultivating Without a Dantian.”

Pear loved books and reading. He settled down to comprehend the abstruse document. While Pear swam through the extraordinarily dense prose, Uncle Jared disappeared into his room momentarily to change clothes.

“You can have the book. Come with me for the moment though,” Jared said.

Jared led Pear to a small shop in a run-down part of the town’s commercial district. There was no sign to indicate what type of shop that it was.

Jared spoke earnestly to the shopkeeper though Pear couldn’t hear what they were saying. When they’d finished, the shopkeeper led Pear to a back room while Jared stayed out front.

“Have you ever heard of attribute cultivation?” the old man asked Pear.

“No.”

The old man started to lecture:

“The ocean has waves and the media is water. Sound is composed of waves and the media is air.

“Light, heat and some other electromagnetic phenomena are waves as well—at least they are partially waves.

“The question is: what is the media?

“A very long time ago, scientists imagined something called the ‘subluminous aether.’ The subluminous aether is the media that light waves ‘wave’ in. In later years, not only did the scientists prove that the subluminous aether doesn’t exist—they also proved that it was completely impossible—even in principle.

“Nonetheless, mass and energy even consciousness are merely waves in the subluminous aether.”

Pear interrupted the lecture.

“Subluminous aether doesn’t exist?” Pear asked.

“Not only does it not exist, it cannot exist,” the old man agreed.

“But everything that does exist is merely waves in a nonexistent matrix?” Pear asked.

“Yes, you’re understanding the principle,” the old man said and resumed his lecture:

“A long time ago a mathematician created a way to handle equations of many variables by imagining a space with an infinite number of dimensions all perpendicular to each other and all sharing a common axis.”

“I’m not a mathematician, but I believe that this is possible because once every variable has been assigned its own dimension, all the surplus dimensions are set to zero and ignored,” he added parenthetically.

“Yuan qi is a form of energy that intersects reality on a single axis. Yuan qi cultivation is by far the most common type of cultivation. People rarely bother to specify ‘yuan qi cultivator’, they simply say ‘cultivator.’

“To an advanced yuan qi cultivator, all the ordinary laws of physics and even logic are no longer laws. They’re just well-meant suggestions—if that.

“Attributes are yet another form of energy—or wavelength—distinct from both yuan qi and from our everyday world and each share a single axis with both reality and with yuan qi.

“Each attribute has its very own space though: wind, earth, water, wood—whatever.

“All analogies break down if you push them too far though.

“Some attributes have sub-attributes—like ice and water, or water and blood, or wood and bone. Ice and water for instance, share more than a single axis, yet they’re each separate and distinct from each other,” the old man said.

“Accumulating attribute qi can be quite a challenge especially at the very beginning, so most would-be attribute cultivators jumpstart their attribute qi acquisition with a gem,” the old man said.

“Now let’s talk about gemstones:

“There are a few combinations of gem and attribute that simply don’t work well together. On the whole though, although many pairings have become traditional, it isn’t because of necessity.

“When rating an attribute gemstone, size matters. ‘More is more better.’ Even the tiniest flaw or inclusion can rob a stone of much of its capacity. There are gem smiths who can use earth attribute qi to remove inclusions and mend flaws, but their time is precious.

“The cut matters a little bit and the so-called “brilliant cut” works best. Gems that are poorly cut with sloppy lines and planes are also largely ineffective. Generally, a gem is cut first and then mended. There is no need to have a gem smith spend many hours mending a gem only to have the stonecutter ruin it.

“Sometimes the setting matters, but most of the time it does not,” he concluded the lesson.

The old man showed Pear a showcase full of attribute stones mounted on rings—mostly gold rings.

“What do you fancy?” the shopkeeper asked.

“Fire attribute—the one with the big honking ruby!” Pear said.

“Pick any finger. The ring will stretch or shrink to fit. Once it settles, you won’t be able to take it off. Don’t get too attached to the ring though. They’re meant to be totally absorbed into the body within a week to ten days,” the old man said.

“Do you know why it has those three smaller stones? The little ruby adds a bit more fire attribute. Those two sapphires hold wind attribute. Even a little wind can supercharge a fire. What else do you fancy?”

Pear placed the fire attribute ring on his left ring finger.

“The ice ring—the one with the big moissanite stone,” Pear said.

“Fire and ice…since ice is a sub-attribute of water, you’ll need to learn a little water attribute before you can specialize in ice. Those two smaller emeralds on each side of the ice attribute gem are filled with water attribute,” the old man said.

“Take this and this,” the old man said.

Pear placed the ice ring on his right ring finger.

“What are these?” Pear asked.

“That big sapphire holds more wind attribute. The big emerald holds more water attribute.”

After a moment’s thought, Pear placed the sapphire on his left middle finger and the emerald on his right middle finger.

“These are blood and bone rings. The ring itself is bone and holds bone attribute. The red spinel holds blood attribute. You don’t even have to cultivate those two. Your body will simply absorb them and they will upgrade your blood, marrow and bone which will eventually increase your strength, endurance, healing speed and as well as your resistance to injury and they will even improve your cultivating.”

“How much are these going to cost? Uncle Jared isn’t rich,” Pear hesitated.

“Whatever the final bill, for your uncle, there is no charge,” the shopkeeper told Pear.

“This is a wood attribute ring. The ring is wood and there is a small sapphire, yellow topaz and emerald on it. These are popular with gardeners. Also, if you ever want to learn any advanced bone techniques you need to have at least a nodding acquaintance with wood.”

“How can bone be a sub-attribute of wood?” Pear asked.

“Look at a tree. The wood is dead, although it serves as a support and passive transport system. The bark is dead as well. Only the root tips, the leaves and the cambium are truly alive. On the cellular level, the cambium and osteoblasts and osteopaths are not that different,” the old man said.

“This is an earth attribute ring. It has a yellow topaz gem—one of the traditional earth attribute stones.”

The old man handed Pear several books and pamphlets with instructions for cultivating various attribute qi and using the attribute qi for both fighting and for craft.

“This is a top quality spatial ring. You will need to let it taste a drop of your blood to bind it to you. Wear it around your neck. Unlike the gemstones, it won’t disappear and wearing it openly is like begging for high level cultivators to try to rob you or bully you out of it,” the old man said.

“Finally, I have one last gift for you,” the storekeeper said as he held up two necklaces with Ping Pong ball sized spherical faceted gemstones.

“I assume that you want to use your fire and ice as a ‘one-two’ punch. It will always be far harder to find and cultivate ice attribute qi than fire attribute qi. This honking big moissanite full of ice attribute qi should address that asymmetry for many years. The other stone is earth attribute. Don’t overlook the utility of earth and wood. Everything doesn’t have to be a weapon. Don’t put the necklaces on until your ice and earth rings are fully assimilated or it will slow the process of absorbing the rings.”

The old man escorted Pear back into the front room of the shop where Uncle Jared waited for him and then he wished both of them well as they left.

“Did you know that old man?” Pear asked his uncle.

“I never met him before,” Jared said.

“Then why did he give you all of that for no charge?” Pear wondered.

“Prince Rubric had molested many girls and women—even boys. He raped a woman who was the daughter of the gem crafting guild’s chieftain. She hung herself for shame and seven of her brothers and cousins died trying to make the prince good.

“When I sent the prince on the long journey, the chieftain said that the guild was forever in my debt. I just asked for guidance and a bit of a discount. I never dreamed that he’d refuse to take any of my money. Any one of those rings that you’re wearing is worth a king’s ransom. We need to go straight home and you need to stay at home until you absorb those rings,” Jared said.

************* *************** *********************

Pear carefully studied his manuals once he was home. He learned that while yuan qi cultivators could cultivate till their hearts content, that a beginning attribute cultivator could only cultivate for about 45-minutes per day, per attribute.

Nothing bad happened if someone tried to cultivate longer, but it was like trying to pour more liquid into a glass that was already overflowing. Pear could clearly sense when it was like that.

It was important to cultivate regularly, because lost cultivation time couldn’t be reclaimed.

Later he could cultivate for longer periods and the rate of absorbing attribute qi would also become faster.

The books said that there were far fewer recipes for attribute cultivation supplements and all of the cultivation enhancing dan were both hard to find and very expensive.

Seemingly in contradiction to the books, Pear’s new interspatial ring had enough of the various attribute qi building pills to last him for the next several years.

While it might take a long time to build the storage capacity for a given attribute, once the reservoir expanded, it would refill itself to its former level in a matter of hours—or even minutes—when it was depleted.

Practicing the martial techniques didn’t count against the maximum cultivation time and it caused the storage to grow a bit, but at present, Pear didn’t have mastery over any true qi-gobbling jutsu.

Pear cultivated fire, ice and water to the maximum every day. He rotated wind, earth and wood. He needed some free time to study the sword.

The author of the big book about cultivating without a dantian, didn’t seem to have been aware of attribute cultivation. His solution to storing qi without a dantian in the early stages, was to block several important acupuncture points and gorge the meridians until they became enlarged.

At some point the dantianless cultivator was supposed to create a network of mini-reservoirs—mini-dantians in effect—amongst the meridians.

Pear had no idea how his attribute qi was stored nor did he have a clue as to how it travelled. On top of that, attribute qi had no levels like yuan qi cultivation. One’s power simply grew larger on a continuum.

On the other hand, while meridians had the same sort of quasi-reality as the dantian, Pear vaguely sensed that the meridians could eventually serve as alternate pathways for his various attribute qis.

Besides, there were a few low-level techniques in the yuan qi cultivating book that Pear craved—stealth, extreme hearing and scanning the surroundings with spirit search.

Pear cultivated his attribute qis in the morning and when he retired he cultivated yuan qi until he fell asleep.

[rvm45]

Chapter Two






Pear sat in the smaller courtyard practicing his attribute jutsu. The vegetation in the larger courtyard had always been sparse. Since it had become the practice yard for Uncle Jared’s sword classes it had become a dusty dirt pile—like the home plate area at a ball park.

Pear was fourteen years old now and he’d been cultivating for a little over eight months. He had managed to get his yuan qi cultivation up to Alpha-3.

Some cultivation schemes gave the different realms names that were tongue-twisting and hard to remember. The local cultivators used the old and almost forgotten Greek alphabet: Alpha Realm, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. No one had a cultivation level above Epsilon—or if they did, they weren’t going public with their accomplishments.

Broadly speaking, there were two systems of cultivation. Ten-step cultivators had ten levels in the Alpha Realm and then nine in each subsequent realm. Six-step cultivation systems only had six levels in each realm but they were farther apart.

Six-step cultivators seemed to progress faster at first, but ten-step cultivators had fewer and far less daunting bottlenecks along the way. Once one started it was very hard—perhaps impossible—to switch. Cultivation methods weren’t legion though and young cultivators were often faced with Hobson’s choice.

For what it mattered, Pear was using a ten-step system. He had no great hopes to ever advance to even the Beta Realm. Cultivating without a dantian became ever more challenging as the levels grew, and with his shape shifting ability and his attribute cultivation, he had no need to go very far down the road of yuan qi cultivation.

Pear was working with the first half of the first step of his attribute qi martial techniques.

He sat and condensed a ball of fire about the size of a golf ball in his left hand while simultaneously forming a similar sized ball of ice in his right palm.

He didn’t have to do both of the techniques at one time, but he thought that doing so was good training. There was nothing magic about the hand choice. He could form ice—for instance—on his left palm, his left foot, in his mouth or balanced atop his head. He preferred to use fire with his left hand—his sword hand—and ice with his right hand though.

When he’d finished with fire and ice, he called up a big ball of water using both hands. The ball of water was hollow and as big as a volleyball. The “skin” of water was about a quarter of an inch thick and the inside was filled with air.

Pear trained his wood attribute by trying to refine a bonsai tree into a wood sprite. The technique might be a trifle advanced, but even if Pear never formed a wood sprite, finagling with the bonsai with wood qi was good training.

Meanwhile, he was trying to use his earth attribute to create an oversized brilliant cut piece of clear quartz three-inches in diameter. He used his wind attribute to sweep with.

“Your parents are home!” Jared shouted.

Bear people tended to be large big-boned folk even in human form. At fourteen, Pear was 6’4’’ and weighed close to 300-pounds. He still had a bit of adolescent softness, but he wasn’t anywhere near being obese.

His hips and legs—especially his thighs—were large out of proportion to his upper body though. It gave him a bit of a pear shape—though that wasn’t where he got his name. Bear people often named their children after good things to eat.

At any rate, Pear would never have an aesthetic physique—like Uncle Jared for instance. He would spend a few years being “hippy” and then he’d go straight to looking large, intimidating and ugly—like an oni—at least from the neck down.

Pear’s father Cherry was 7’1’’ and weighed over 400-pounds while Pear’s mother Goldenrod was 6’7’’.

Pear had the same golden blond hair and gold colored irises that gave his mother her name.

Bear people tended to have furniture built to fit their Brobdingnagian proportions. Jared stood 6’1’’ and weighed about 230-pounds and he always looked like a child sitting at the family table.

Pear’s father had a cobalt blue soup bowl that he had used as a handle less drinking vessel. He’d told Pear that he’d had the bowl ever since he was a small boy. The ladle that the family used for soup or gravy had a small chip on the enamel on the lip. The chip had been there for as far back as Pear could remember.

Pear had an epiphany as he sat at meat with his family. A home was mostly about family and kin, but things like Cherry’s soup bowl and the chipped ladle and the thick slab-topped table went a long way toward making a house feel like home.

“Pear has been cultivating attribute qi,” Jared said.

“Is that so Pear?” Goldenrod asked her son in a pleasant voice.

Pear held his palms out and produced balls of ice and flame as he’d been practicing for the last few weeks.

“That is well done son!” Cherry thundered.

If the family had stayed in the mountains with the tribe, even Pear’s studying the saber would have been considered fey and effeminate. Cultivating would have blown some of the inbred hillbilly elders’ minds.

Pear knew that his family moving to the city and living with the mundane had something to do with his aunt and Uncle Jared. So far as Pear was concerned, anyone who said they had a problem with Uncle Jared was volunteering to let Pear rack up more fighting experience.

At any rate, Pear ran with the neighborhood kids. He had shot marbles, played tetherball and box hockey with them. He’d become a voracious reader of books. More recently, he’d become a sword master and now he was cultivating.

Cherry and Goldenrod could—in theory, at least—move back in with the clan. Pear was already too much of an iconoclast. Pear firmly believed that tact and diplomacy were simply synonyms for hypocrisy. He would never fit in with the bear clan—or anywhere else for that matter.

“I’ve also awarded Pear his master’s rank,” Jared said.

Both Cherry and Goldenrod couldn’t understand their son’s dedication to the way of the sword, but neither did they object. It made both Pear and Jared happy and it kept the two of them out of worse mischief.

“We have a surprise for you two as well,” Goldenrod said.

“We have been saving our silver and we finally have enough cutter to buy a big farm—but it’s about three month’s travel from here. We’re going to rest a couple weeks and then we’re going to try to find a caravan to hook up with. Even drawing mercenary pay from a small caravan is like found money, since we need to head in that direction anyway,” Goldenrod said.

Cherry and Goldenrod made a living as mercenary guards for the large caravans. The large caravans hired multiple guards even though they were seldom attacked. The number and quality of the guards was one big reason why they weren’t often robbed—or even suffer an attempted robbery.

As adult wirehair grizzlies, Cherry and Goldenrod were entitled to top wages. Even amongst bear people, the pair were extraordinary. Some small caravan owner would be able to hire two top-of-the-line guards for a minimal fee this time around.

Pear was trying to reconcile himself to being a farmer. He already had far more strength, endurance and recovery ability than almost any mundane adult. Working from “can see” to “cain’t see” wouldn’t make him miserable. It would simply waste time that he could be reading, cultivating, hunting or perfecting his sword craft.

“We’re not going to be farmers. We bought a farm of over 3500-acres—though about half of it is still wooded. There are fifteen tenant farming families as well as house servants and guards. Your father and I are going to be the laird and his lady,” Goldenrod joked.

************* ************* *********************

Pear went to visit the next-door neighbor.

“You’re going to sell me your ox,” Pear told him.

“No, I’m not,” the man said.

Pear hit the man with a hard-left jab followed by a mild overhand right. He could have put the man down for the count, but then he couldn’t continue to “negotiate” with him.

“Wrong answer,” Pear told the man.

“What in the Hell is your problem?” the man asked angrily.

Pear gave the man a hard liver shot and while the man was incapacitated, he yanked his pants down around his ankles. The man decided that in addition to being a raving lunatic that Pear was a splayed rapist as well. He started wailing like a lost soul on the floors of Hell.

Pear grabbed the man’s scrotum with a gloved hand and showed him a sharp hunting knife.

“I was three years old when you castrated Billy. Do you think that I don’t remember? Turnabout is fair play,” Pear said.

He let the man experience terror for awhile before he hooked the man’s belt to a spike nail protruding from the house leaving him hanging upside down.

“I believe that maleness is sacred. The ancient Hebrews believed that. Notice their strictly Patrilineal inheritance. Carlos Castaneda also believed that maleness was rare in the universe at large, as well as being sacred.

“Leaving all that aside, a man or beast bereft of his balls loses all will to walk with his head up and look anyone—no matter how exalted—in the eye,” Pear said while touching up the edge on his knife with a small steel.

“You see, when you castrate anyone, you blaspheme all maleness everywhere. You can get more money for a saddle-broke gelding than for a stallion and an ox is more valuable than a bull? Do you mean to say that you place money before maleness? Billy goats and boars will grow up to have rank meat if they aren’t castrated—so you value a few pounds of meat above the sacred maleness?” Pear lectured.

“Castration is a fate far worse than death or torture. I believe that it is quite literally the vilest act that a man can commit. I believe that so strongly, that I don’t even believe in castrating castrators. I’ve been playing a bit of a head game with you there,” Pear said.

“Let me up Pear,” the man said in a calm voice.

Pear helped him up from the ground and helped brush the dust off of the man to see where he was coming from.

“You can have the ox. I’m sorry,” the man said.

“I don’t mean to rob you. Take this,” Pear said.

“What is this?”

“Those are yuan qi cultivation tablets. There are a few martial techniques and a few special purpose pills. Your son Dusty is what? Seven years old? Read the cultivation manual to him—you can read, can’t you?” Pear interrupted himself.

The big book that Uncle Jared had given him had some illustrations and descriptions of many medicinal plants and herbs. With Pear’s bear person senses and his ability to focus on something to the total exclusion of all else, he’d quickly gathered enough valuable medicinal plants to make him nouveau rich.

“Give Dusty one of those white pills every two weeks. That’s more than many inner disciples at some fairly large sects receive. There is about eight years’ worth of cultivation enhancing pills at that rate. The sects test for new disciples every three years. You have to be at least fourteen and no older than twenty-five years old. With all that to supercharge him, he should be a shoo-in,” Pear said.

The neighbor fell to his knees.

“Get up dude! Only kneel to God. I’m not God and God is very Jealous. I’d hate to think that you made him angry at me,” Pear said.

The man started crying—just flat out bawling hysterically.

“Now what? I’m sorry that I struck you. I didn’t know that you’d weep like a teenaged maiden,” Pear was rapidly becoming exasperated.

If the man was gas-lighting Pear, he was doing a bang-up job.

“Pear, you’re right! You’re absolutely right. I’ll spread the message to all my friends and neighbors. Thank you for enlightening me,” the man wept.

“I don’t even know your name,” Pear said.

“I’m Bear—Bear Jackson,” the man said.

“What a coincidence. I am a Bear and you’re named ‘Bear.’ Bear, I’m happy for you. Here, this is my favorite Bible. There’s a lot more to being a good man than not castrating folks. The most important thing is accepting Jesus,” Pear said while calling the Bible from his interspatial ring.

Bear charged over to the paddock fence and looked his ox in the eye.

“Billy, I’m sorry!” he shouted at the ox.

“Were you drinking before I gave your brain a good shake?” Pear asked.

Pear grabbed Billy’s jaw and force fed him a black dan the size of a golf ball. While the ox was making a dubious face, Pear fed him a jumbo apple. By the time Billy had chewed and swallowed the apple, the all-healing dan had completely sublimed and filled the beast’s body.

“Was that an all-healing dan?” Bear asked.

“Yeah, Billy should be a bull again by the day after tomorrow—at the very latest,” Pear said.

“Aren’t those pills precious?”

“I could probably auction it off for enough money to buy half of this town—and pay more than that half-town was worth even then,” Pear said with a shrug.

“Follow me Billy. You’re my buddy now,” Pear told the ox—or the soon to be bull—or whatever.

Pear led Billy to a saddlery shop in town.

“Dude, it is like: I want you to make me a saddle for my beast and it is kinda like a rush job,” Pear said, peppering his speech with many unnecessary words and circumambulations just like a gentleman.

“Do you have the cutter?” an apprentice saddle maker asked Pear with a calculating squint.

“Dude, it is like: go get your boss before I give you a hands-on seminar about good customer relations,” Pear said.

The master saddle maker walked out.

“Do you need a bridal?”

“No. He followed me here. He is quite capable of following my directions without a bridal.”

************ *************** ***********************

Pear rode his bull toward the front of the caravan. Pear’s family had three wagons full of gear. Pear had been at some pains to make sure that nothing precious like his father’s cobalt blue coffee bowl or the chipped ladle got damaged or misplaced.

The three wagons were pulled by three pair of stout oxen and they had a couple spares to rotate in or to replace the injured.

Pear had a long face when he saw the oxen.

“I didn’t castrate them Pear,” his father told him earnestly.

“It happened years ago. Where could I find a pair of bulls willing to work as a team? Let alone four pair? Once the oxen get us to our destination, I’ll turn them out to pasture and they’ll never have to work again. Will that satisfy you?” Cherry cajoled.

The caravan had fifty-three wagons. Most of the content of Pear’s family cargo could have fit in one of the big commercial wagons with some room to spare. Each caravan wagon was also pulled by a single pair of oxen. Since the shoulders of the oxen was higher than Pear’s head, they were obviously some sort of spirit beasts.

There was also a pair of nobles and their retinue. There were thirty-five wagons and a grand carriage. All of the nobles’ wagons were pulled by four giant Clydesdales. The giant Clydesdales stood over thirty hands tall at the shoulder and they out-massed an African elephant.

Their hooves were the color and brightness of silver. Their teeth were mystic bronze and their breath caused snowflakes to form in the air before their nostrils.

Someone had paid mages to prevent most trees and tall shrubs from growing within about thirty yards of the dirt highway. Still, Pear thought that the chigger weeds, milkweed, black berry and wild roses left plenty of room for enterprising bandits to stage an ambush.

On Pear’s third day with the caravan one of the nobles—a girl—asked him if she could walk beside him.

“My name is Nimbi. I’m twelve years old, and I’m a princess” she said.

Pear examined her. Her skin was white like a mime or a kabuki dancer. Her eyes were solid black—sclera, iris and pupil. From some angles, her face looked like a skull with empty eye sockets.

Her hair was jet black, fine, silky and as straight as a geometer’s dream. Her lips were black as was her tongue and her gums. Her nails were also black. She was close to 6’ tall but very skinny—perhaps 140-pounds. Her voice carried an air of great weariness.

“I’m Pear. I’m fourteen. I’m a bear person and a sword master. My friend is Billy. He was a steer, but now he’s a bull,” Pear shrugged.

She needn’t put on airs in front of Pear. A sword master completely trumped being a princess in Pear’s eyes. No need to tell her that he was a gifted and powerful attribute cultivator. She didn’t need to know everything.

“Who is your master?” Nimbi asked.

“Grandmaster Jared the Fool,” Pear said proudly.

“Did you really feed an all-healing dan to a steer?” Nimbi asked.

“Is there another way to get someone’s balls to grow back? Cause we got eight oxen that could sure use a set,” Pear said

“You look sickly. You can ride Billy and I’ll walk beside you if you wish,” Pear said.

“I’m a nylen. All nylen look sickly,” she said.

“What is a nylen?” Pear asked.

“Have you heard of elves?” she asked.

“Supposedly, they lived a very long time ago, but no one is sure if they were real or fictional,” Pear said.

“We aren’t sure if elves ever existed or not either, but whether elves existed or not, Nylen are a nocturnal subspecies of elves—and to be honest, we’re a bit degenerate compared to real elves,” Nimbi said.

“Even if elves never existed, you are still descended from them?” Pair questioned.

“True,” Nimbi replied with a weak attempt at a smile.

Pear muttered something to himself about vibrations in a non-existent matrix.

“You’re an attribute cultivator!” Nimbi said with a big smile.

“Whatever,” Pear said.

He was annoyed to be found out so fast.

“What are those two hooded beasts that walk behind your carriage?” Pear asked.

There were two great beasts tethered to the rear of Nimbi’s carriage. They looked like bison-sized hyenas with a dash of wolf and sabretooth thrown in here and there. Pear guessed that one of the beasts weighed at least 3000-pounds.

The beasts were charcoal gray with baseball-sized black spots distributed randomly on their rearmost third. The beasts had a distinctive musky odor that wasn’t offensive—not to Pear anyway.

They seldom stumbled even though they wore hoods like hunting falcons.

“Those are wargs,” Nimbi said.

“Where can I get one?” Pear asked.

“No one but our royal family has them. They are never offered for sale, but I’ll give you both of them if you can persuade them to follow you,” Nimbi said. “I don’t like them.”

“What are they for?”

“With all their drawbacks, wargs have one extremely useful ability. They are very fast and they are all but impossible to trail. I mean, their back-trail is erased and hidden by some sort of mystic ability. If we’re attacked, the wargs are my brother and my emergency escape system. That is, if we can imprint them,” Nimbi said.

“Why haven’t you bonded with them then?” Pear asked.

“My brother and I are both very feeble and imprinting the wargs is fast, but it drains a great deal out of you. I doubt that we could successfully imprint them anyway. Also, a warg can only be imprinted once in their life. Once they’re imprinted, they are of no further use to anyone except their master,” Nimbi said.

“How do you imprint them?” Pear asked.

“You have to get them to swallow a bit of your blood. It takes brute force or trickery. Persuasion is of no avail,” Nimbi said.

Pear fetched a couple of legs of venison from his spatial storage ring.

Pear had a couple of wooden mixing bowls and he squeezed a half-pint of blood into each bowl.

He cut the straps that bound the wargs to the carriage and pulled them to one side.

“Are you hungry dudes? This venison doesn’t have any of my blood on it. Let me take those annoying hoods off so you can enjoy your meal. You are two very pretty creatures. I’d really like for you to become my friends. If you don’t want to, then you can leave, but I wish that you’d let me take your saddles off first. Those are bound to be uncomfortable. I’m sure that you could get shed of them, but why draw out the process?” Pear said.

A rear quarter of venison was a mere snack for these two. They merely munched away. They chewed the femur as easily as Pear would chew a carrot.

“I’ll be your brother,” the male warg said.

“I will too,” the female said.

Pear could hear their voices inside his head.

He carefully put a bowl in front of the male first and then the female. Only then did he take a blood pill to heal the gash that he’d let his blood from.

“Turnabout is fair play,” Pear said.

He used a big syringe to take well over a pint of blood from a prominent superficial vein on the female warg’s neck. Then he emptied the syringe into the same wooden bowl that the female had used.

“Pear! Wargs are filthy, nasty and unclean…” Nimbi began.

At that point, Pear had chugged the contents of the wooden bowl, making further comment irrelevant.

“Your turn,” Pear told the male.

After Pear drank the male’s blood the beast complained to Pear.

“You took way more than you gave bear,” the male said.

“You’re a lot bigger than me. Still, if it’s an issue…”

Pear grabbed the males lower jaw in such a way that he couldn’t bite Pear’s hand without biting his own tongue. He forced a blood restoring dan deep down the warg’s throat.

“What would you have done if I’d bitten your arm off?” the male grumped.

Pear rolled up his sleeve and let just his right forearm turn to a wirehaired grizzly’s forearm.

“How would you have liked that scraping your throat clean all the way out?” Pear asked cheerfully.

“There is no need to shove the dan down my throat,” the female said. “Just place it in my mouth.”

“Do you want some of my blood now?” Nimbi demanded.

“I won’t turn it down if you’re offering me some,” Pear asked.

“You damned fool! You’re supposed to turn the wargs loose after you have their loyalty, not before. I thought that you’d be killed,” she said.

“Don’t be deceived. I really like those two big doggies, but the two of them wouldn’t stand a chance against my bear form.”

Pear wasn’t sure exactly why, but ever since he started cultivating, his bear form had grown in strength by leaps and bounds even though it hadn’t gotten much larger.

“I could hear the wargs talk in my head. After they drank my blood, their voices became louder and clearer. I thought that if I drank some of their blood, that it might draw us closer,” Pear explained.

“Who else but you would want to get closer to a filthy nasty warg. I think that you must be some sort of vampire,” Nimbi spat.

Pear’s upper eye teeth were long decorative fangs—like a bear—or a vampire. They were considered decorative because a human jaw wouldn’t open wide enough to bring them into play.

Nimbi also had decorative fangs, but hers were the first upper premolars.

At any rate, Pear made a show of licking his fangs.

“I’d really like some of your blood Nimbi,” he said while leaning close to her.

“You’re a fool!” she said angrily.

“No, that’s my Uncle Jared,” Pear teased.

That night when Pear walked into camp, both the wargs trailed behind him like oversized hounds.

“Who are your friends Pear,” his mother asked evenly.

“These are my new brothers. They speak to me telepathically,” Pear said.

*********** ************** ********************

“So, the nylen girl gave you the wargs—just like Bear gave you Billy,” Cherry asked.

“Pretty much, though I didn’t beat her up or give her any compensation. She’s mad though, because I drank some of the warg’s blood,” Pear related.

“Pear, I’m not at all sure that nylen are human. Then again, I’m not at all sure that our bear tribe is human. Many years ago, your uncle courted my sister. Some of our family were outraged, but it was all the same to me. Nylen, human, shape shifter—just whatever. If you want to be friends with the princess, all I have to say is to guard your back side,” Cherry said.

Pear was a bit surprised. Bears matured faster than humans, but bear people had lifespans four or five times as long as a mundane and they actually matured slower than the mundane in some areas.

Specifically, bear people seldom entered puberty until their mid-twenties. Some only started puberty in their mid-forties. Pear might become full grown and have the strength of his prime, but he wouldn’t feel the vaguest stirring of sexual desire until his hormones kicked in.

Some young humans seemed to have sexual desire or at least fixation on things sexual well before the biological change. Pear was as uninterested as someone neutered as an infant.

He puzzled at his father’s meaning. It was almost like he was giving his blessing for Pear to court the nylen princess at least a decade or two before it could even conceivably become an issue—and such a thing would be highly unlikely even then.

Since Pear had discovered that blood contained knowledge, he’d be far more interested in tasting the princess’ blood than kissing her.

“Nylens are a very degenerate and perverse race. Your princess may be an exception, but beware.” Uncle Jared counselled.

[rvm45]

Chapter Three







A few days later, Pear was riding the female warg while Nimbi rode Pear’s bull—since the wargs wouldn’t allow anyone except Pear to ride them.

“Your uncle doesn’t look like a bear person,” Nimbi remarked.

“He isn’t. He married my aunt,” Pear replied.

“Where is your aunt?”

“She died in childbirth when I were but a wee lad,” Pear said.

“So why is he still hanging around after all these years, if his wife is dead?” Nimbi asked.

The question didn’t anger Pear. It just mystified him, since it seemed either pointless and self-evident.

“He’s family. Where else would he go?” Pear answered still not sure that he wasn’t being set up for some sophomoric verbal prank.

“Is family important to you?” the princess asked.

“Of course.”

“I’m the crown princess. Someday I will rule my land, but measures have to be taken to assure the continuation of our royal bloodline. In about four-and-a-half years from now, there will be a tournament to determine who the royal consort will be,” Nimbi said.

“All of my brothers and sisters are eligible to take part as well as all of my first and second cousins. The winner will win my hand,” Nimbi said.

“Sisters? How does that help promulgate the old bloodline?” Pear asked.

“We’re very inbred as well as degenerate. If we had to rely on normal methods, the royal line would have died out long ago. It is possible to combine DNA from two persons and place the result in a surrogate womb,” Nimbi said.

“Nonetheless, a sister who enters the chase will be a womanizer. The wedding has to be consummated publicly after the ceremony and at every new moon thereafter,” Nimbi said.

“Eso es muy perverso,” Pear said.

“Tell me about it,” Nimbi sighed.

“I don’t want to marry one of my siblings. I don’t want to put on a pornographic sex show for the drooling masses and all of my cousins are inbred cretins. There is one way out for me. I’m allowed to pick one champion—even if he isn’t related to me. If he is an outlander, and if he wins and I accept him as my husband, my throne will be forfeit and I’ll be forced to leave the country—but with all of my belongings and servants,” Nimbi said.

“Wie wirklich Mann, sei echt!” Pear commiserated.

“What does that mean?” Nimbi said irritably.

No one spoke German or Spanish anymore. They were ancient dead languages. The intellectuals peppered their speech with the occasional phrase in German or Spanish though, much the way folks had once slipped in a sentence in Latin for special emphasis. Since Pear was widely read, he’d picked up the habit of dropping the occasional phrase.

“It doesn’t mean anything really. The literal translation is:

‘“Really man, be for real’,” Pear said.

“I’m sorry to be snippy. I’ll tell you a secret. Nandi is my twin brother, but he’s one of the good guys. We sneaked out of the country to try to find a champion for me,” Nimbi said.

“What is your country like?” Pear asked.

“It is far south of here, far from the warm tropics. The temperature only rarely gets above the mid 60’s even in summer, but in winter, the temperature rarely goes below 35-degrees. Nonetheless, there is about 3’ of snow that never melts or runs away,” Nimbi said.

“Das ist seltsam genug—sorry—that is to say, that’s odd enough. Last time that I checked, the freezing point of water was 32-degrees,” Pear said.

“My country is ‘The Kingdom of Perpetual Snow.’ There is some sort of ancient formation on the whole land. We get most of our food from greenhouses. Most of them are heated by some sort of attribute. A few are geothermal and there’s even a few that use steam heated by wood or coal. The point is that the water has to be specially treated by cultivators to become liquid—even in greenhouses with temperatures in the 70s or 80s,” Nimbi said.

“I’d like to see your country sometime,” Pear said.

“It isn’t out of the question, but visitors aren’t welcome. My class—the nylen—are rabidly xenophobic. The commoners aren’t—at least most of them aren’t. They don’t dare make an outlander feel too welcome though,” Nimbi said.

“Okay,” Pear said.

He had the feeling that Nimbi was trying to lead the conversation somewhere and she was becoming frustrated at his interruptions, so he resolved to just listen.

“The snow is about 3’ deep. It is firmly packed to the point that there’s no need for snow shoes. It snows occasionally, but the snow never gets any deeper and it always looks fresh and unmarked. Some believe that the excess snow sublimes directly into the air,” Nimbi said.

“There are a few mystical plants that grow in spite of the snow. The land has many lush forests, though they grow very slowly and can’t support much wildlife,” Nimbi said.

“Some trees have a 4 or 5’ border where the snow doesn’t cover the ground. Others grow right through the snow. Most of the plants liquefy the snow in a manner similar to the method our greenhouse cultivators use. A few plants can circulate the finely powdered snow in lieu of water. The fruit of these trees is very good for anyone with any sort of ice or water attribute. But the trees are few and far between and they only bear fruit every twenty or even fifty years,” She said.

Nimbi produced a branch with eight sky-blue fluorescent fruits. They were as big around as a plum, but they were elongated to about two-and-a-half times their width.

“These are blue ice fruit. If you were a yuan qi cultivator, each fruit would raise your level by one. They don’t work once someone advances to Gamma Realm though. A yuan qi cultivator also has to be cultivating some sort of ice jutsu to absorb the qi. Anyway, you’re an attribute cultivator. The point is: they will raise your power dramatically. Don’t eat more than one fruit per day though,” Nimbi said.

************ *************** **********************

Of course, Nimbi didn’t know that Pear was also cultivating yuan qi in his half-assed dantianless way.

Nimbi had gotten into the habit of eating supper with Pear’s family. Pear didn’t mind, but visiting with Nimbi after supper cut into Pear’s cultivating time.

Pear had advanced to the state that he could cultivate to the exclusion of sleep for about three days, but he needed to crash on the fourth day. After ascertaining that Uncle Jared couldn’t benefit from any of the weird fruits, Pear assimilated one of the blue ice fruits every one of his cultivating nights.

The upshot was that Pear’s ice attribute became far stronger and he advanced to Alpha-10 as a yuan qi cultivator. He had stretched his meridians enough to form mini dantians at the base of each arm and leg as well as one close to his sternum. All of them added together couldn’t store as much as one medium level dantian, but there you have it.

*********** ************** *********************

Shortly after Pear ate the last fruit Nimbi told Pear that her twin brother Nandi wanted to meet him.

The trip northward was very hard on the two nylen. At least Nimbi had enough strength to get out and move around. The exercise and fresh air mitigated some of Nimbi’s malady. Nandi was too weak to even do that.

Pear climbed into Nandi’s carriage. Nandi looked at Pear for a good long time.

“My sister is too bashful sometimes and you can’t take a hint it seems. She’s trying to recruit you to be her champion. I think that even as impractical as she generally is, that she has come up with an excellent candidate. Are you willing to lay your life on the line for my sister?” Nandi asked.

“Of course, I’ll help her if she asks,” Pear said.

“It is almost certain death,” Nandi said.

“I’m invincible,” Pear said.

Every sword master had to believe that deep down inside. Without that complete conviction, one couldn’t advance to master. Of course, sword masters died occasionally, but however inconvenient death might be, it wasn’t a defeat.

“Do you know what a weird is Pear?” Nandi asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to die soon. I don’t know exactly how or when, but it will be soon. I have some treasures. Nimbi can’t use them and I disdain the rest of my family—except my Uncle Saim, but Uncle Saim doesn’t need my treasures. I’m going to give them to you,” Nandi said.

“There are only three blue ice fruits in my bag. I’m not a crown princess. That should get you into the Beta Realm of yuan qi cultivation. You’re the first dantianless yuan qi cultivator that I’ve met. I’d like to see how you adapt to Beta Realm, but we’re not fated to meet again in this life,” Nandi said.

“It is appointed to men, once to die but after death cometh the judgement,” Pear quoted.

“You’re a Christian?” Nandi asked in surprise.

“I’m not the best example of one, but yes I am,” Pear said.

“Then I’ll see you again on the other side after you take the long journey. Nimbi tells me that you have some very strong convictions about castration,” Nandi said.

Nandi produced a big black dan only marginally smaller than a cue ball.

“This is similar to an all-healing dan but for beasts. It can also turn a mundane beast into a spirit beast—though that takes several pills—and one of them can raise a lower level spirit beast’s power by one level. They are very valuable, so I brought a few hundred with us to sell if necessary, but now they’re yours,” Nandi said.

“Thank you,” Pear said.

“Do you know why that Nimbi and I are so feeble and sickly?” Nandi said.

“I haven’t a clue unless the snow jutsu that dwells in your land affects your blood circulation,” Pear said.

“That’s a clever deduction, but it isn’t correct. At least it isn’t a major factor. All nylen are very inbred and also, we’re under a curse. On our sixteenth birthday, we’re asked to embrace evil. If we embrace evil we become very strong with a lifespan of centuries. Then we acquire all sorts of dark powers. But if we don’t embrace evil, then we’re tortured and slain,” Nandi explained.

“Won’t Nimbi be confronted with this choice well before the wedding tournament? Pear asked.

“No, in her case, she doesn’t have to decide until the culmination of the wedding tournament. Of course, if you win, she’ll be exiled and not have to make that fateful choice,” Nandi said.

“There’s something that I don’t understand. Both of you are free now, why go back?” Pear asked.

“We haven’t eluded them. They’ll find us and drag us back eventually,” Nandi said.

“Pear, you can trust me. I’m going to die soon though, so that’s a moot point. You can trust Nimbi for the nonce, but once she’s been back in the kingdom for awhile, be wary of her,” Nandi said while warming to his topic.

“Then there’s my Uncle Saim. He skirted the embrace of evil on a technicality that was related to branch descendants and he’s become a general despite of that. He tries to use his power to protect the good and the weak. He may compromise too much with The Powers That Be, but he won’t sell you out or betray you lightly,” Nandi said as he fell into a long coughing fit.

“I won’t see you again. Put this on and let me see it on you,” Nandi rasped.

He handed Pear a necklace composed of two-inch diameter wooden beads. It would hang well below the sternum when worn around the neck.

When Pear donned the wooden necklace, he felt inundated by a tidal wave of wood attribute qi.

“What is this for?” Pear asked.

Nandi was beyond further talking and he simply waved for Pear to take his leave.

[rvm45]

Chapter Four







The first thing that Pear did when he got back to his family’s campsite was to feed all eight of his father’s oxen one of the big healing dans. Then he gave Billy one as well as the two wargs.

“We don’t have levels like spirit beasts,” the female warg explained.

“The pills will make you stronger though, won’t they?” Pear asked.

“Yes, to a degree,” she said.

“Those dans are exceedingly precious, so why are you feeding them to oxen?” the male asked.

“Isn’t it evident? They’re oxen whereas fate had intended them to be bulls,” Pear said.

Billy became a spirit beast with the first pill. The oxen needed at least three pills to change. One ox ate eight pills before he turned. Pear fed them all pills at the rate of one per day until they’d all reached at least Level-5. He’d fed Billy all the way up to Level-8.

As Billy’s level climbed, his horns grew and both his horns and his hooves became some sort of weird mystic gold that was far stronger than the strongest of steel. It wasn’t immediately evident, but his bones were also mystic gold.

Beasts didn’t have realms divided into ranks like yuan qi cultivators. They just had ever increasing levels. A spirit beast at Level-5 was probably at least twice as strong as a cultivator at Alpha-5. A spirit beast at Level-6 would be more than three times as powerful as a cultivator at Alpha-7.

The higher the beast’s level rose the bigger the gap between cultivators and spirit beast’s power levels became. A spirit beast at Level-12 would be a match for a pair of cultivators at Epsilon-3.

Some cultivators as well as some beasts had power far above the average for their level, and many also had special abilities that lifted their combat ability far higher than their level would suggest.

Beasts above Level-12 were scarce, but there had been reliable accounts of beasts at Level-15 and even a couple of cases of beasts at Level-18. Level-5 was a sort of watershed for spirit beasts though. A spirit beast at Level-5 had an excellent chance to survive, prosper and level up in the wild.

Pear’s own yuan qi cultivation soared to Beta-2 with the boost that Nandi’s three blue ice fruits gave him. That wasn’t a bad cultivation level, but since Pear didn’t study any yuan qi martial techniques, it was much like giving an extra-bright lantern to a blind man.

There was a lightning attribute ring with a very large stone in the prince’s qiankun bag as well as a modest sized wind attribute ring.

There was also quite a few books and pamphlets describing endless martial techniques or jutsu. The wood attribute necklace that Nandi had given Pear caused wood attribute to pour into Pear’s body quickly enough to make Pear’s head spin.

The qiankun pouch was a wonderment in and of itself. Every qiankun pouch that Pear had ever seen or heard of was made from tan colored buckskin and decorated with elaborate Indian beadwork patterns along with dyed porcupine quills.

If the drawstrings weren’t just for show and if you could force the bag open, a qiankun bag looked big enough to hold about a quart. Even the largest capacity, and most powerful qiankun pouch could only hold slightly more than 25-cubic yards.

Pear’s spatial ring could hold almost five times that much.

The qiankun pouch that Nandi had given him could hold all the wagons on the caravan with space left over. It was a tiny drawstring bag about 3’’x 5’’ and it seemed to be made from plain unadorned black velvet. You could even put an interspatial ring or another qiankun pouch inside it.

Nandi had a library of over thirteen thousand books all stored on shelves inside the qiankun bag. Of course, none of the bookshelves would fall and none of the books would tumble out of their shelves regardless of how much Pear shook the pouch.

Time, entropy, gravity and decay held no power inside even a regular qiankun pouch, let alone the supreme qiankun bag that Nandi had gifted him.

There were huge armoire’s full of hundreds of sets of fine clothes. The clothes would have been far too small on Pear, except that this sort of charmed clothing would stretch or grow until it was a perfect fit—but only for the first person to wear the clothes. Fortunately for Pear, Nandi had far too many clothes to bother to try most of them on.

There was money, fine jewelry, first class works of art, weapons, food and wine—a lot of fine food as well as huge quantities of gross foodstuffs. There were maps as well as Nandi’s journal. There were also extremely large stockpiles of cultivation aids.

Pear cultivated lightning and wind every day until the two rings were absorbed and then he totally ignored lightning. He was up to cultivating fire, ice and water for over an hour per day and he rotated giving earth, wind and wood an hour per day. Then he had sword forms to practice. He was floundering in a sea of attributes.

As he slowly read and absorbed the knowledge in Nandi’s cultivating books—because they were very hard to understand, even for Pear—he come across a wonderful technique that let him cultivate all of his various qis at one time.

He started to spend an hour-and-a-half cultivating every night and got more done in less time and with less effort.

Pear was already very strong, even in human form, as a result of his bear person physique. His body had started to harden and mature a bit and then the influence of the three blood and bone rings, plus the general increase of vitality that any type of cultivating brought, had started to give Pear incredible physical strength. He lifted weights easily that would have caused his father or mother mouth to drop in astonishment.

*********** ************ ********************

Pear and Nimbi were walking perhaps fifty yards in front of the caravan. The wargs had gone into the woods to hunt and Billy—who had gained the ability to talk—was harassing the caravan’s spirit beast bulls as they labored pulling the large wagons.

None of the other bovines could speak aloud which added to Billy’s enjoyment—though Pear had every confidence that the beasts were responding quite vociferously in mental speak.

There were numerous archers hidden in trapdoor pits beside the trail. Pear wasn’t a priority target and the brigands had been warned of dire things that would happen to them if they harmed Nimbi. Consequently, the two of them were spared from the initial attack.

Cherry and Goldenrod were high priority targets. Pear’s mother fell with eighteen arrows in her torso, without being able to strike a single blow.

Changing into bear form would destroy one’s clothing when there wasn’t time to disrobe, so bear people didn’t transform on a whim. Nonetheless, some sort of premonition caused Cherry to transform an instant before the attack began.

A score of arrows rattled off of Cherry’s wirehair armor.

The brigands were dressed in some sort of makeshift paramilitary brown clothing and armor. Three archers clad in scarlet ran up to point blank range and shot Pear’s father with charmed arrows with broadheads an inch-and-a-half wide.

Pear’s father groaned as he gave up the ghost.

Pear’s eyes had turned from golden to blood colored as the berserker took him. Bear people were prone to berserkers, but Pear’s cultivation and the blood and bone rings that he’d absorbed elevated Pear’s berserk state to a whole other level.

“Hide in the woods,” Pear barely managed to rasp to Nimbi.

Turning into a bear would make him far more conspicuous. Pear was a little sad to realize that even his berserker state was denatured polluted reason now. Nonetheless, he ran while bent over until his upper body was parallel to the ground.

He thought that the red-clad warriors would be the most formidable, so he attacked them first while he had the element of surprise.

Pear struck the head off of one archer who had his back turned to him and decapitated the second archer as he turned.

The third archer dove at Pear’s legs and attempted to bring him down. Pear buried his mercy dagger in the man’s skull. The good news was that Pear had achieved one hundred percent client satisfaction. The bad news was that his dagger was stuck in the client’s skull.

Pear released and abandoned the mercy dagger. He smashed the reinforced metal rim of his buckler into the temple of a brown clad brigand.

Later he would be proud to note that at least once during the battle, he had let his rage totally take control over him. He ran his saber right up to the hilt in a brigand’s chest.

That looked impressive but 6’’ to 8’’ was quite enough to reach the heart or other vital organs. Stabbing deeper only tended to tie one’s weapon up.

The last brown warrior stabbed at Pear with a spear. He caught the right corner of Pear’s mouth and instantly Pear’s cheek was slit open exposing all of his right-hand molars to view. The spear took a crazy twist at the end and rose toward Pear’s eye. Fortunately, it only grazed the eye’s right corner before cutting its way out of Pear’s flesh.

Pear had no time to free his saber. Instead he simply raised the saber with both hands, until the dead client’s feet were clear of the ground and charged. He now had both the mass and the speed of a 500-pound champion sumo as he collided with the last brigand. Pear’s saber protruded far enough from the first client to transfix the second.

He tried to curse as he pried his saber from his clients only to find that speech didn’t work at all well with his mouth cut wide open. He couldn’t spit satisfactorily at the dead client’s shadow either.

He quickly claimed the three powerful bows of the red archers. He fully loaded one quiver until it was at full capacity and then called the other two into his black qiankun bag.

Pear ran toward where he’d last seen his uncle. Uncle Jared was surrounded by several brigands. He had an arrow through one thigh, an arrow in his high chest and a freely bleeding spear wound in his abdomen.

Pear used his new bow to send arrows through four of the brigands while Uncle Jared killed the other three.

“I see that you’ve advanced to grandmaster. I’m proud of you,” Uncle Jared said.

Pear realized then, that being a master or a grandmaster wasn’t a title that someone was persuaded to award you. It was a non-ambiguous state when something inside of you had advanced.

It had been there when Pear became a master, but he wasn’t quite sensitive enough to fully apprehend the change. He could feel his grandmaster status though, once Uncle Jared had mentioned it.

“We won’t survive this son,” Jared said.

“When surrounded by clients on all sides, what do you do?” Uncle Jared shouted.

“Kill! Kill! Kill without mercy!” Pear managed to chumble out.

Since he could speak after a fashion now, there was something that he needed to tell Uncle Jared—something he’d never put to words before.

“I love you Uncle Jared.”

“I love you too Pear. You’ve been like a son to me,” Jared said.

A man rode up from behind Jared. He rode a very tall and emaciated horse that had a huge bony lump on his back roughly comparable to a camel’s hump.

The man was as cadaverous as his mount. He wore no armor. He wore fine silk clothing that was a bright shade of crimson. He also carried no weapons—unless the 4’ walking stick with the huge sky-blue gem on one end was some sort of weapon.

The man leapt off his odd mount and then he grabbed Uncle Jared’s skull and crushed it easily. Blood and brains flew in every direction.

The man’s eyes were pure white and a bit roughly surfaced—like the shell of a hardboiled egg. His nails were jet black and shiny like Nimbi and Nandi’s, but his had turned into 4’’long talons.

He also had black lips, tongue and gum like the nylen twins. Only his tongue was a good 18’’ long and it forked 8’’ from the end and each fork split again about 3’’ from the end. His tongue continually darted in and out of his mouth like a viper’s.

Pear charged the man with everything that he had. Never mind a sumo. Pear’s charge would have knocked a half-a-dozen braced sumos lined up one behind the other flat on their asses. For a moment, Pear felt as if he’d ran into Yggdrasil the world tree.

“Feeble,” was all that the man said.

Pear changed into a wirehair grizzly and prepared to charge once more.

The size of one’s bear form hinged on a number of things—including one’s physical maturity. Personal power was also important and strong emotion could add a couple or three hundred pounds.

Pear’s bear had been hovering around 1000-pounds when he started cultivating. He was almost a year older now, His power had gotten much higher and he was in the midst of a soul cleansing rage. He changed into an 1800-pound wirehair grizzly.

He didn’t even get to charge though. The man appeared in front of Pear and did something that eyes couldn’t see. He felt the worst physical pain that he’d ever experienced run through his body like a bolt of lightning.

On top of that was a sense of aching loss. Something that he’d greatly treasured had been torn from him forever. There was no respite from the agonizing sense of loss. Not even death could cure the ache.

‘That is what castration would be like,’ Pear thought with extraordinary clarity.

The silk wearing man held something white and nebulous in one hand. It was vaguely shaped like a bear made from cloud essence. The disgusting man licked and slurped like a two-year-old eating cotton candy. When he’d fully consumed Pear’s bear he licked his lips and fingers and gave Pear a lascivious look.

“Now you can’t even reincarnate, since I’ve devoured part of your soul,” the man said.

“You’re a fool. There is no reincarnation. That’s a con that Satan plays on you heathens to make you think that you get more times at bat. You don’t. Life is a one-shot deal. So far as my soul goes, all souls belong to God. He can damn them, but no one can sell, buy, barter, destroy or even damage a soul. What you damaged was my spirit not my soul,” Pear said with remarkable clarity.

“So, you’re a Christian? I’ll leave you to contemplate your theology while you die in agony,” the man said.

“You are a fool. The day will come that you will weep and tear your hair while you regret that you didn’t finish me off when you had the chance,” Pear spat.

Pear didn’t want to die just yet, but in his eyes, it would be cowardice not to court death by verbally taunting his client. His enemy wasn’t impressed and he chuckled to himself as he walked away.

Pear could hear Crimson haranguing Nimbi and giving out orders to his troops about a hundred feet farther down the line of wagons and on the other side of them.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo said that cowards theorize with the goal of surviving always kept firmly in mind. He also said that when it is time to take vengeance, don’t wrack your brain trying to be clever. Even if there are a thousand clients and you’re alone, simply start on one end and start cutting them down. You’ll be surprised how many clients that you send on the long journey before you’re cut down.

The “Hagakure” said that to die that way is to die as a dog or a fanatic—but upon reflection, what is so bad about dying like a dog or a fanatic?

Pear thought that if he could catch up to Crimson, that he could throw his life away in a manner befitting a samurai.

Pear had read about the Baraka or the crazy luck. When the Baraka settled upon a man he would survive and prosper although everyone around him was cut down.

The crazy luck wasn’t much of a blessing though, because it would always desert one somewhere down the line. When it did, death was inevitable—usually a horrible death. On the other hand, possessors of the Baraka were more or less obligated to practice brinksmanship and take wild gambles with their life. Nothing would drive the Baraka away faster than trying to play a restrained and conservative hand.

Of course, the Baraka couldn’t override God, but Pear believed that much of the time God let things play out pretty much as they would without his direct intervention. After all, this life wasn’t even a good dress rehearsal for the next.

Pear used a spear that had about half of its butt-end broken off as a makeshift cane as he forced himself to his feet. He had never felt so tired or hurt so much.

“There is something that you haven’t learned yet, my dear niece,” Crimson’s voice drifted back to Pear’s ears.

“You either become evil or you must have evil done to you. You men—do whatever you want to her so long as you don’t kill or permanently mar her. Maybe pulling a train will bring her to her senses,” Crimson.

Pear would never again believe that one can die from anger. If that were so, he would have died just then.

His sword belt was rigged to pop open rather than be ruined by his transformation. Pear snapped the belt back together and bolted it on his waist once more and then he swallowed a half-a-dozen energy recovering pills.

Perhaps it was the Baraka, the will of God or mere happenstance, but when Pear stepped out from behind the wagon, Crimson and his bizarre mount were clean out of shouting distance and all of the mixed bag of red fiends and brown clad brigands had their back to him as they were shucking Nimbi’s britches off.

Losing the ability to shape shift hadn’t robbed Pear of any of his strength or recovery ability—and Pear had refined three very powerful blood and bone rings.

Pear threw the spear-half hard enough to penetrate the boiled leather armor on the back of one brigand. The blade of the spear protruded 10’’ from the front of the man’s armor.

Pear managed to execute a powerful horizontal figure “8” and two clients lost their heads before they could turn around.

The red fiends were stronger, had better armor and were more skilled than the brown-clad brigands. One of them used his Eastern style saber or dao to strike the back of Pear’s saber hard enough to make Pear’s left arm go numb.

That was some sort of martial jutsu. There wasn’t enough physical striking power in the whole world to make his arm go numb that way.

Pear could still lift his left arm arm though. He pointed his palm at the red fiend and sprayed him with fire attribute qi equivalent to burning napalm.

Napalm burns at between 1500 and 2200-Degrees. That’s hot enough to melt bronze, but not quite hot enough to melt iron. It was quite hot enough to fry any of the men present if they caught any of the flames.

Most practical backpack flamethrowers have 7 to 9-seconds worth of burn. Pair could spray his flame continuously for about 25-seconds.

Phase 1 was to condense a ball of qi. Phase 2 was to learn to throw the ball both hard and accurately.

Spraying was Phase 1 of the second tier of the martial jutsu Pear was practicing. Phase 2 would be to learn to use precise one second or less blasts while increasing both the flame’s temperature and the length of time that he could use the fire stream.

Pear wasn’t there yet. He still sprayed like a poorly-trained Tommy gun user. Still, he burned several clients to death with his wild sprays.

The more someone mastered fire attribute the more resistant they became to fire. None of the brigands and red fiends seemed to have fire attribute. Apparently, enlisting to be head firemen in Hell didn’t grant immunity to flames in this life.

A red fiend captain laughed hysterically when he saw Pears stream of fire peter out.

Pear raised his right arm and sent a stream of liquid oxygen at 300-Degrees below zero at the man. Pear seemed to have both more liquid oxygen and better burst control with the ice attribute qi.

A brigand tried to attack Pear’s left side. Pear raised his left hand and gave the man a spray of liquid oxygen. Just because he didn’t use ice qi with his left hand as a general rule, didn’t mean that he couldn’t.

There turned out to be more clients than Pear had fire or ice to satisfy. Still, there were no more than five or six of them left when Pear’s ice and fire attribute was exhausted.

A red fiend chopped at Pear with a dao. Pear produced a 30’’ hollow ball of water with one-inch thick walls. He interposed it between his body and the dao.

The red fiend ended up with his dao and his right forearm stuck in the extremely sticky water ball. Pear drew a cruciform assassins’ dagger and casually poked the right side of the client’s throat. Blood sprayed as the right hand jugular vein and carotid artery was severed.

Pear couldn’t carry on any longer. He threw the stiletto at a charging brigand. He only managed to make a shallow wound across the man’s face. That was enough though. The stiletto’s blade was treated with the purple salve made from purple tarantula venom.

A red fiend selected a spear with a longer than standard shaft from the ground. He didn’t want to get any closer to this adolescent death dealer than he had to.

Just as he got ready to thrust, a Bull as wide and as thick as a bison appeared. The bull had golden horns and hooves and his hair was the color of fresh blood.

Billy was now a Level-9 spirit beast. Pear had been Billy’s good friend—his only friend for many years—since before he became intelligent. Pear fed him apples and carrots. He curried him and he talked to him.

Unlike the wargs who communicated by telepathy, Billy could speak the human’s tongue.

He plowed into the side of the red fiend who was preparing to skewer Pear with all the momentum of a runaway freight train.

“You knob-gobblers think that you’re going to hurt my friend? I think not,” Billy roared in an impossibly deep and booming voice.

Billy stood guard over Pear. Just then the wargs returned from their hunting trip. When they had killed the last of the clients, both of the wargs looked at Pear as if to ask permission.

“Don’t eat my uncle, my parents of the merchants and their guards. As for the rest of them—eat your fill. Please save any hands, qiankun pouches or spatial rings for me,” Pear said.

“What are you going to do with the hands young man?” someone asked.

Pear looked up to see a man dressed in black from head to foot. He had the blackout eyes like Nimbi and Nandi. His weapons seemed to be a pair of melon hammers with thick metal shafts. If the steel spheres on the end of each hammer weren’t hollow, they’d weigh 16 to 20-pounds.

Pear had a pair of 12-pound melon hammers that he worked out with and he wouldn’t have tried to use them in a fight. They were too heavy and cumbersome to use as weapons.

“I want to use their finger bones to make necklaces with,” Pear said.

“Pear, this is my Uncle Saim. He came to rescue me, but you and the wargs had already accomplished that,” Nimbi said.

“Did you imprint the wargs?” Saim asked Nimbi.

“No, Pear fancied them and I let him try to imprint one. Surprisingly they both accepted him as their master,” Nimbi said.

“Pear can talk to the wargs in his mind. After they agreed to serve him, he drank some of each of the warg’s blood,” Nimbi said.

“That’s impressive. You’re a bear?” Saim asked.

“I was. Crimson ripped my bear out of me. Where is Nandi?” Pear said.

Nimbi didn’t answer. She simply walked over to a corpse who’d had his skull split and his brain scattered all around.

Pear had no respect for his enemies whether dead or alive. He had no real attachment to the mortal remains of friends and family either, but while a dead body was just so much troublesome garbage, there was no need to be deliberately gauche.

However, Pear was still horrified to see Nimbi cut both of Nandi’s hands off. She walked over and presented them to Pear.

“Might as well have the finger bones of a friend in addition to the finger bones of your enemies on your necklaces,” Nimbi said.

“Don’t trust this fellow. I think that he’s an imposter,” Nimbi sent to Pear via mind speak.

Her mind speak was notably weaker than Pear or the wargs, so she needed to be in contact with Pear to send him a clear message.

“I’m going to take Nimbi back to The Kingdom of Perpetual snow. No one will dare attack her until the coronation so, long as she’s by my side. I can’t say the same for you. They’d kill you out of hand—so, thank you for protecting my niece and goodbye,” Saim said.

************ *************** ***********************

“I thought that he’d never leave,” Billy said.

Pear took two all-healing dans, a couple of blood replacing dan and several qi restoration pills. His mutilated cheek had stopped its hot angry throbbing, but judging from his looks in his small shaving mirror, he’d always have a scar across his face causing the right side of his face to be permanently drawn into a fierce snarl.

Once he felt up to walking about, Pear decided that with the massive storage ability of his qiankun pouch that there was no need to be greedy. He’d simply take everything.

He sent his family’s three wagons into the pouch and then all of the other wagons. His own family’s eight spirit beast bulls were unaccountably missing, but all of the other beasts of burden—the large spirit beast oxen and the giant Clydesdales had been slain.

Pear hadn’t wished the beasts any harm, but now that they were dead, it would be a shame to let all of that perfectly good beef and horse flesh go to waste. Pear called them into his pouch.

Pear found a very badly injured Bloodhound that had one of his front legs cut off. He remembered seeing the Bloodhound and the teenaged son of the caravan master running and frolicking around before, during and after the day’s travel.

The dog had been severely injured in a futile attempt to protect his master.

“You choose,” Pear told the dying Bloodhound.

He showed it a human all-healing dan in his left hand and a cruciform bladed stiletto in the other. The human dan was faster and more powerful than a beast dan. It was also a good deal more expensive and harder to find. He meant to offer the hound a choice between healing and life, or a quick and painless death.

The dog nudged the left hand holding the all-healing dan. Pear waited until the first pill had fully sublimed and then he fed it another. The hound wouldn’t be up for walking for a few days though so Pear loaded him onto the front of his saddle.

He’d stored all of the brigands’ and red fiends’ bodies in his massive qiankun bag. He wanted the finger bones and the skin. Leather made of human skin fetched top prices in some circles and the bodies could feed the wargs.

It made Pear feel good to think of desecrating the bodies of his foes—even though he believed that mortal remains were of little or no importance.

He stripped the corpses of the caravan people of anything even remotely useful and then he used his flames to give them a decent cremation. Pear stored his family’s remains separately. Someday he’d find a suitable place to bury them.

Of course, Pear didn’t cremate the caravan people until he was well away from the site of the attack.

He more than half expected that his foes would return to check out the site of the battle. It cost Pear some qi, but there was no indication that anything had ever happened there.

“Friends, let’s assume that Crimson will regret having spared us. Let’s assume that he’ll either come himself or send someone with power enough to deal with us and excellent tracking ability. You two are the experts on stealth. You decide the direction, speed and hours travelled per day until you feel that we’re out of harm’s way,” Pear said to his wargs.

[kaijafon]

as usual! you deliver one amazing and interesting story! thanks

[rvm45]

Chapter Five







The friends fell into the habit of rising at dawn and putting in eighteen hours of hard travel before they stopped for the night.

Pear was very deeply damaged. Very few shape shifters could survive after having their beast form ripped out of them.

He reeled drunkenly in the warg saddle. He learned to sleep and even to cultivate in the saddle. When they finally called a halt, Pear would swallow some dried rations without even bothering to chew very much—just enough to get the dry food down.

Since he didn’t feel like bollixing with starting a fire and feeding it, he’d lay with his back against the male warg’s great chest to keep him warm. The Bloodhound would lay to Pear’s front. That kept both the wounded hound and Pear warmer than they’d have been separately.

Sometimes Pear would have nightmares. He’d awaken and wrap his arms around the huge carnivore’s neck and sob himself back to sleep. The crabby and cynical male warg accepted this without comment. He’d have tried sending words of comfort, if he hadn’t been acutely aware that words were of no value in this situation.

Finally, after ten days of the killing pace, the male warg said, “If we haven’t lost them by now, we deserve to be caught.”

“Let’s travel hard one more day and then we’ll take a day off to rest and take stock,” Pear said.

************* ************** ************************

Pear slept until a couple hours after sunrise the next morning. Since they’d stopped next to a small pond with extra clear water, Pear decided to bath and change into clean clothes.

A large python was stupid enough to ambush the Bloodhound. Pear used one of the 350-pound draw weight red fiend bows to send a charmed arrow through the python’s skull firmly anchoring it to the tree it had descended from.

“That was a Level-7 python,” the female warg marveled at the efficacy of Pear’s archery.

“So, who wants to feast on all the roast Level-7 python that they can eat tonight?” Pear asked.

*********** *********** *******************

“Y’all need names,” Pear told the wargs and the hound.

“And you need to level up,” Pear said to the hound.

“If you two don’t mind, I’m going to name you after my benefactors,” Pear said.

“Pear, having names is a very great honor for wargs. Our strength and even our ultimate potential will rise considerably. You could call us ‘Urine’ and ‘Vomit’ and we’d still be overjoyed,” the female said.

“Well then, from now on you’re ‘Nimbi’ and you are ‘Nandi’,” Pear said.

He pointed at the Bloodhound and said, “Your new name is ‘Misery’.’’

“Pear, do you intend to go to the competition for the Princess’ hand in a little over four years?” Nimbi asked.

“Yes. Not only did I give my word, but life has no meaning for me aside from anticipating my rematch with that knob-gobbling Crimson,” Pear said decisively.

“I know of a hermit. If she agrees to help you, it will raise your cultivation strength tremendously,” Nandi said.

“Have you met her?” Pear asked.

“No. I’ve never heard of her either. I take my comprehension from the estate that is beyond data, knowing and not knowing,” Nandi said.

“Well, that’s good enough for me,” Pear said.

“Actually, neither Nandi or I have ever left The Kingdom of Perpetual Snow before we were brought on this expedition,” Nimbi said.

************ *************** ******************

As Pear and his family travelled through the forest, they came across a battle in progress.

A three-eyed violet winged lioness was battling a giant smoldering coal bear.

“Please, the lioness asked. “Spare me for the cub’s sake.”

“Once that I’ve thoroughly crippled you, I’ll let you watch as I slowly torture your cubs to death and then suck their brains out,” the bear rumbled in an impossibly deep voice.

The lioness was the size of an African buffalo while the bear was larger than an African elephant.

The giant smoldering coal bear had dark charcoal gray hair that had lines of burning orange embers advancing in random lines all over its body. The flames burned off all of the bear’s fur and crisped the skin to varying depths in its wake.

However, the skin and hair regenerated even faster than they’d burned off. The stench of smoldering hair and scorched skin accompanied the bear wherever it went.

“The lioness is at Level-15, while the bear is at Level-18…” Nimbi started to tell Pear, but he’d already walked between the two combatants.

“Hold brother! I’m Pear, son of Cherry of the Wirehair Grizzly Tribe. Spare these two as a favor for a kinsman and I’ll more than make it up to you,” Pear said.

“I spit on the Wirehair Tribe and I spit on the shadow of you father!” The giant bear roared.

“Is this any way to speak to your betters? Now I’m not only obliged to kill you, but after you lie dead beside me, I will piss on your shadow—but then, it probably won’t be the first time that someone has disrespected your shadow. I hear that y’all seldom come out, except on moonless nights to avoid having your shadows disrespected,” Pear ground out.

The bear roared and flooded Pear with wave after wave of comparatively cool orange fire.

“I’m a flame user Dumbass!” Pear said contemptuously.

Pear hosed the bear with his much hotter attribute flames. The bear was burned very badly across his face and torso, but he could heal exceptionally rapidly.

The bear charged toward Pear thinking to use his far greater mass at close range. Meanwhile, Pear threw a hollow water ball 3’ in diameter. The water worked heap bad Juju on the bear’s fire nourished body.

Nandi and Nimby attacked the bear’s front legs, which made him stand upright. The wargs’ super powerful jaws had taken two bites the size of gallon milk jugs out of the bear’s left forearm while Misery had taken a pint-sized bite from the bear’s right forearm.

Pear charged the bear. Billy met Pear halfway, lowering his head and hooking upward as if he were trying to toss Pear overhead. Pear stepped nimbly onto Billy’s golden horns as he used them as a springboard to soar towards the bear’s head.

The bear turned his head thinking that Pear was aiming for his eyes. Pear called a long triangular mercy dagger into his left hand and drove it deep into the bear’s skull beside its ear.

Pear shoved his right fist as far into the bear’s right ear as it could go and then shot about two-and-a-half gallons of liquid oxygen into the bear’s ear. Pear then leapt as far from the bear as possible while triggering a tiny residual flame he’d sent after the liquid oxygen.

The bear’s brains sprayed out of his eye-sockets, mouth and left ear as the liquid oxygen burnt, expanded and exploded.

Pear severed the bear’s head just to be extra sure that it was down for the count. Then he waked around to the shaded side of the bear and emptied his bladder on the bear’s shadow.

“Threaten to spit on my father’s shadow, will you? I’ll kill your whole damned family!” Pear screamed in rage.

He took two steps away from the bear and then another paroxysm of ill-temper caused him to step back and kick the bear’s carcass twenty-five or thirty times.

“I would speak to you human,” the three-eyed winged lioness said.

Pear walked to her side.

“Can I help your injuries?” Pear asked.

“I’m dying. Will you promise to watch over the cubs?” the lioness asked.

“Of course,” Pear said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to do it without compensation,” she said.

A beast core came out of the lioness’ torso and levitated before Pear. It was the size of a small banana though straight. It was faceted all over its surface and it was as clear as the finest crystal.

The lioness turned her paws into hands and laid one on each cub’s head. Visible waves of qi came out of the lioness’ hands and into the heads of the two cubs. Within a few seconds the lioness had faded away to nothingness.

“She gave her cubs her life energy, but she gave you her core. It’s crystal because all of the qi was drained from it,” Nimbi explained.

“So, it isn’t as good as a regular crystal?” Pear asked.

“On the contrary, crystal cores are precious beyond reckoning and extraordinarily rare,” Nimbi said.

Pear had seen his parents and uncle killed. He’d lost his friend Nandi—for that was how he thought of the strange sickly nylen. He’d had his bear ripped out of him and he’d seen his strongest moves snickered at.

There was nothing left inside of Pear that was capable of caution, backing down or compromising. He’d triumph or he’d die and he no longer even recognized the incredible audaciousness of his fighting tactics.

If having even a tiny preference for survival—all else being equal—was cowardice; then Pear had fully purged every bit of cowardice from his psyche. He truly didn’t care if he lived or died. That was his greatest strength, but it was also one of his bigger liabilities.

Pear examined the lion cubs. One was bright red while the other was a loud lime green. They regarded him gravely with their three eyes. Both of the cubs were male.

“The color of three-eyed winged lions tells you what their attribute will be. Red signifies fire attribute. I’m not sure what attribute goes with green,” Nimbi said.

“Water, perhaps wood,” Pear guessed.

“Water attribute lion cubs are black while wood attribute cubs are brown,” Nimbi said.

Pear started feeding Billy, Misery and the cubs one of the big beast dans every week. Misery was weak. Billy was very strong, so how wonderful would it be if he grew even stronger? Finally, the beast dans would help the cubs to grow up strong. The wargs claimed that they had maxed out the benefit that the dans could bring them.

They all feasted on Level-7 Python flesh and Level-18 bear meat almost every day unless something new fell to Pear’s arrows—which wasn’t infrequent.

************* **************** *********************

Over three weeks had passed when Nimbi broached the topic for the first time.

“Pear, you don’t have a dantian,” Nimbi began.

“However, there is a way to implant a beast core to more or less assume the role of a dantian. The drawback is that it is extraordinarily difficult to find a beast core that is compatible with a cultivator. In our case we have two. The crystal core is compatible with anyone because it has no beast qi. The bear’s core is compatible because you are a bear person who uses fire attribute,” Nimbi said.

“What’s the advantages of each?” Pear asked.

“The lioness’ core has no qi. Nonetheless, beast cores naturally absorb qi from their environment without the need for cultivation. You can also store heroic amounts of attribute qi in the crystal core,” Nimbi said.

“On the other hand, the bear’s core is chock full of orange flame attribute qi. It is cooler and less focused than your own fire attribute qi but the supply is almost inexhaustible,” Nimbi continued.

“I thought the bear was using yuan qi. Do you mean that there’s more than one type of fire attribute?” Pear asked.

“Apparently. I didn’t know that myself until I saw it. The thing about the bear’s core, is that it has a Level-18 spirit beast’s worth of qi. Your body couldn’t handle the strain and the core has a bit of wisdom. It will seal most of its power until you’ve strengthened your qi bearing channels enough to bear the load. You should start out at about Level-4,” Nimbi said.

“Taking just one smacks of greed. Is there any way to implant both of them?” Pear asked.

“Yes, the lionesses core should go in your center abdomen an inch or two below your navel—approximately where your dantian would be if you had one. The bear’s core will sit centered on the junction of your thoracic and cervical vertebrae—on the anterior edge of course,” Nimbi said.

“Let’s do it to it!” Pear said.

“Pear, one minor point: the two cores will compete for qi a bit so it will take longer for them to be filled,” Nimbi cautioned.

“I thought that the bear core was filled to the 18th level,” Pear said.

“It is, but it is filled with beast qi and the low intensity orange fire attribute qi. Once implanted it will store other kinds of qi for you,” Nimbi said.

Nimbi explained that the various types of qi freely interpenetrate one another. A core that would store “one-gallon” of yuan qi would also be able to hold another gallon of fire attribute qi and another gallon of ice qi and another gallon of earth qi and so on. You might have a dozen gallons of various qi stored in the same one gallon space, so long as none of the qis had more than one-gallon’s worth.

On top of that, a human cultivator’s stored yuan qi differed in some subtle ways from a beast’s stored heaven and earth qi. Pear’s new crystals were fully capable of storing each—only the cores would only store beast qi automatically. Pear would have to cultivate to fill them with human yuan qi.

Nimbi had Pear draw some formations on the ground and memorize a series of nonsense syllables and hand seals. Pear was a bit chary of the whole system because it seemed to smack of witchcraft.

“The formations funnel yuan qi. Think of the hand seals and the nonsense syllables as the valves and signals that lets the qi flow through the appropriate channels. There is no summoning or appeals to unclean spirits and the nonsense chants are just that—picked purely for the sound vibrations with no underlying meaning,” Nimbi coaxed.

Pear sat naked in the center of the formations. He had been extremely reluctant to part with his velvet qiankun bag. He’d finally placed it before him, just outside the outermost circle of formations and just out of easy arm’s reach. Pear reminded himself that if anything untoward happened, that he must put retrieving the qiankun bag ahead of everything else including saving his own life.

Nimbi instructed Pear mentally as to how to form the hand seals since she lacked human hands and fingers to demonstrate directly. She could project images of hands forming the seals into Pear’s consciousness.

“Relax Pear. Nothing bad will happen if you get a hand seal or a chant wrong. You won’t even need to start over. You just won’t be able to advance to the next stage until you do the seal correctly,” Nimbi said.

“Advance Hell! Who’s advancing anywhere?” Pear snapped.

“You can’t perceive your progress but I can,” Nimbi soothed.

Finally, the clear core rose and turned insubstantial. It levitated and then rushed into Pear’s lower abdomen. Pear had a huge belch that took him completely by surprise and made him chuckle briefly.

Pear had no dantian, but he had meridians. Since he’d been using the meridians to store bush league quantities of yuan qi, they were larger in diameter and stouter than even many advanced yuan qi cultivators.

The core rerouted most of the local meridians to run through it on the way to wherever else they were going. It only hurt a little, but there was an itchy sensation as well as a tickling sensation that went along with it.

Once the lioness’ core was firmly ensconced the bear’s core followed suit. This time Pear didn’t belch, but the core was large enough to put pressure on the back of his throat making his sneeze repeatedly. Pear’s tissues were plastic enough that they quickly reformed themselves to seamlessly integrate the bear’s core.

“Are we done?” Pear asked.

************ *************** *******************

Five weeks after Pear absorbed the beast cores the friends came to a rather steep rocky slope. It wouldn’t be impossible for the wargs and the golden hooved Billy to walk up the slope, but neither would it be especially easy.

After a climb of almost a mile, the slope turned into a vertical cliff.

“There is a cave hidden behind that pile of boulders,” Nandi said. “It is big enough for all of us to pass and that is where we need to go.”

Pear accepted that the wargs seemed to have their own spheres of expertise. Nimbi knew nothing about this cave or the powerful hermit while Nandi knew nothing about the process of implanting beast cores into humans.

“Well then, let’s do it to it,” Pear said.

There was a doorway into a long passage. Limestone caves tended to be damp with floors of mud. Depending on how far above the current water table they were, they could be prone to flooding.

Lava caves tended to be linear without many branches or chambers and they often connected to molten pools of lava deep inside.

The only other caves that Pear was aware of was ice caves hollowed out of huge glaciers and sea caves formed by the sea crashing against certain types of rocks.

This cave didn’t seem to fit any of those categories. It was wide open—nothing tube-like about it—and the walls seemed to be made of polished granite and basalt. There were occasional places where the passage opened enough to become chambers and there was occasional branching.

“We’re almost there,” Nandi said. “I’ve half-way thought better of this. I have to warn you that she is very fearsome to behold.”

“I can’t afford to be afraid if I want the power to crush Crimson in four years,” Pear said.

Pear never had much use for people who claimed that proceeding in spite of being afraid was courage. That sort of faux courage was only good enough for women and shopkeepers. Being afraid was cowardice. Being so afraid of death that one was driven to life-saving measures in spite of potentially paralyzing fear was the epitome of cravenness.

The way of the warrior is death. Whenever a clear-cut choice between life and death presented itself, the warrior inevitably choses death!

The passage widened and the entourage found themselves on a huge balcony-like ledge overlooking a pit that was wide and deep beyond human reckoning.

There was a dragon in the pit and the balcony was placed to put any visitors on eye level with the dragon.

The dragon had three pairs of eyes—each pair roughly equivalent to a human’s pair of eyes—leaving a vertical line of three-eyes on each side of the dragon’s face. Each of those six eyes were bigger than a football stadium—football, not soccer. Soccer isn’t football!

There were three slightly smaller eyes in an equilateral triangle with one eye on the bottom angle. The triangle’s midpoint was centered on the top pair of eyes, so the triangle’s topmost pair of eyes rose a bit above the topmost pair of facial eyes.

Then there were two extra-large eyes far out to each side of the dragon’s head. They were too far out to focus to the front, but each one commanded almost 180-Degrees of peripheral vision.

One of the eyes from the topmost pair of eyes regarded Pear gravely.

“I can’t go into your world,” the dragon told Pear conversationally. “I’m too big and powerful to fit. I’d rip your cosmos to shreds. We meet in a sort of in-between created space that can only be approached through long underground passages in your world,” the dragon said.

“You humans have a saying that there are no free lunches. That isn’t one-hundred percent correct. Granted, someone or something somewhere had to pay for that free lunch. However, from the individual’s standpoint there is the possibility of windfalls and largesse,” The dragon continued.

“I’m about to lay a gargantuan largesse on you. Later I will reveal my aims and goals that I have toward your space. You won’t be compelled to help me. However, given what I can read of your personality, you will feel compelled to act on my behalf—but not because you owe me,” the dragon said.

“Forget the kind of gratitude that engenders debts of conscious. You owe me nothing. It is simply that I think that you will wholeheartedly believe in my agenda. For now, go to the series of rooms that I’ve prepared for you. There is wealth beyond the most avaricious of dreams. Don’t let greed cause you to partake sparingly of my bounty. Grab as much of it as you can possibly lay hands on. Come and talk to me again before you leave, if you would. I think that I’ll have a world-rocking martial technique for you by then.”

*********** ************* *********************

There was room after room full of books filled with cultivation and martial techniques, both for yuan qi cultivators and attribute cultivators. There were books on collecting herbs, minerals and animal parts and books on how to combine the ingredients into elixirs, salves or dans. There were books about spirit beasts and how to hunt, avoid or tame them.

Pear took his time and carefully selected close to five hundred books.

There were store houses with room after room full of bottles composed completely of amethyst. They were most like a cylinder but they bulged toward the middle and tapered toward the mouth.

Each bottle was faceted and it was stoppered by another amethyst. The neck of the bottle and the surface of the stopper fit together as tightly as precision glass lab ware.

The bottles were rather thick walled, and so they only held a little over a pint. The amethyst gems were filled with various attribute qis. They weren’t topped off. That would be a ridiculous amount of attribute qi, but they held as much as a topped-off 35-Carat gem would hold.

The contents were what made the bottles priceless though. Each bottle held about 18-ounces of dragon blood.

The instructions said that the blood could be drunk or it could be diluted in a tub and bathed in. One bottle would only be enough for one person to drink whereas twenty or so men could bathe in the diluted blood. They wouldn’t absorb anywhere near as much though.

The instructions said that bathing would feel like being fried alive in hot grease. Drinking would cause even more intense pain. Strangely enough, both methods were claimed to be painless ways to increase a beast’s level and physical toughness.

Pear collected bottle after bottle of the priceless vials. There was far more vials here than he could place in his qiankun pouch, even if he emptied everything else out.

There was a smaller series of rooms that held much smaller bottles made from hollowed diamonds. The bottles were approximately the size of small lemons and they were said to be filled with dragon’s tears. The instructions claimed that the tears were a painless means of drastically improving one’s eyesight and night vision and they also sped up the processing of visual data at every step of the process. The tears should also raise someone’s overall power by three to five percent—not a lot, but every little bit helped.

Pear wasn’t greedy with the diamond vials filled with dragon tears either. As objects to sell or barter, the tears were probably handier to dispose of as the application was painless and one bottle could be used on fifty or sixty men.

There was room after room filled with top quality weapons. Pear had the custom-made saber that his uncle had commissioned for him and he was working hard on forming weapons from both fire and ice. Nonetheless, missed chances don’t come back—or at least they rarely come back.

Pear repressed the inner spirit of greed and beat it down without surcease as he loaded hundreds of good weapons into his bag.

There were rooms filled with crates and baskets overflowing with quaint coins of gold, silver and platinum. There were many precious gems and beads made from gold, silver or semi-precious gems.

Some rooms were filled with works of art—statues, paintings, wood carvings and suchlike. Then there were rooms filled with rare and expensive dans, lotions and spirit herbs. There were attribute rings and necklaces with stones the size of robin’s eggs.

Pear figured that he had enough attribute built up. The thing now was to master the attributes that he had while gradually building them up through cultivation.

He took four blood and bone rings and placed them on the index and middle finger of each hand. One could never have too much bodily strength. He noticed rings with stones of dark blue-black zircon filled with metal attribute. He didn’t yet have any metal attribute, so he put one of the rings with the gargantuan size stone on each of his ring fingers. Then he placed a moderately sized wind attribute sapphire ring on one pinky and a lightning attribute ring on the other pinky.

Then he grabbed great handfuls of the rings and necklaces to put into his qiankun pouch along with a great number of legend-ranked spatial rings and high-level beast cores. When he noticed what looked like a bushel basket filled with clear crystal beast cores, he brought all of them, basket and all, into his bag.

Eventually, Pear decided that he’d done all the damage that he could reasonably do to the dragon’s accumulated treasures. If he ever needed more, he could always come back. The dragon had assured him that he was welcome at any time and that he had unlimited access to the treasure warehouses.

[rvm45]

Chapter Six






Pear’s family left the dragon’s realm and set up residence in a small cluster of chambers about 300-yards from the cave’s entrance. The cave was already pretty good place to live, but very few things are ever ideal.

There was a small spring coming from the wall at one point. The spring water was uncommonly rich in both earth and water attribute qi. Pear used his earth attribute to create a small reservoir and the overflow went to fill a small hot tub sized stone basin a short distance downstream.

Pear went around using his earth attribute to mold and alter the stone floor. It became much more level and the surface was altered to highly polished marble. It wasn’t necessary for all of the walls to be flat. On the contrary, the curved stone walls here and there added to the ambience. There were places that a flat wall suited Pear’s sense of aesthetics better though.

Pear created recesses about a foot deep, 2’ wide and 9’ tall. He left stone projections ever foot and placed boards across them to make bookshelves. The books that Nandi had given him were all stored on their own bookshelves, but the built-in bookshelves pleased Pear more.

His wood attribute also got a good workout. He went outside and fetched heroic quantities of wood. Dead leaves, weeds and half rotten logs would have worked just as well, but good-sized logs were easier for the immensely strong Pear to handle.

He molded the wood into the shapes he wanted using his wood attribute. His wood attribute could reach into the wood fibers on a molecular level and reweave them. Nondescript generic wood became something like highly-figured hardwood like Birdseye and curly maple, air dried fruit woods like peach, pear, apple and cherry or highly figured walnut. Of course, Pear’s consciousness didn’t weave the wood atom-by-atom, but the qi reconfigured the wood into something very much like Pear envisioned.

Pear’s “wood” wasn’t exactly “wood” though. In his quest to make it stronger, less moisture absorbing and resistant to decay his cellulose strands had assumed some of the characteristics of synthetic polymers—just a little and not visible to the naked eye.

Pear faced a conundrum every time that he left the cave. Anything could happen. He might find himself alive but totally unable to return to the cave and he was loath to leave anything behind. On the other hand, repacking every time that he got ready to leave the cave was extremely tedious.

His parents had felt free to leave some of their treasured belongings behind when they went abroad, but Pear and Uncle Jared had been there to guard them. Pear had nothing left of his family except skills, memories and a few relics like the ladle with the chip on its lip and his father’s cobalt blue soup bowl.

Of course, the physical souvenirs were the least of the trinity, but nonetheless, they were precious to Pear.

He discovered that he could create archival quality “paper” with his wood attribute. He could also make faux leather book covers that would take a microscope to distinguish from the real thing.

He copied all of the books in his library. Having all of the books the same color might be monotonous, so he had faux leather covers that were burgundy, forest green, navy blue, amber yellow, orange ochre, bone white and sable.

The edges of the pages were gilded with gold leaf. Gilded edges weren’t just decorative, they held up better when a book was expected to last for generations and be read many times.

Pear went through all of the merchant wagons. There were many things that were “okay” but not hard to replace. He kept one of the caravan wagons and one of the nylen wagons in his bag, but he either left the other wagons’ contents stored still in the wagons or he unpacked them for daily use.

He kept his family’s three wagons packed away in his bag, but he brought a few things out for daily use. It wasn’t too hard to pack these few things away whenever he went hunting or herb gathering outside.

Pear used fine cord of mystic silver and strung finger bone necklaces along with eye teeth and beads of turquoise, jade, pearl, ivory, antler, horn, iron and gold.

He put Nandi’s finger bones on a necklace with the claws and fangs of the giant smoldering coal bear and some wolf fangs. He wouldn’t have used Nandi’s remains that way except Nimbi had specially requested him to do so.

He ended up with several necklaces though he generally thought that it was a bit inconvenient to wear more than a few at a time as a general rule.

He tanned the hides of the brigands and the red fiends and carefully stored the skins away. He had little use for them and would probably sell or barter them away to someone whose gate was swung by such things. He thought about using a few for book covers, but he couldn’t decide which books were especially suited for such treatment.

In contrast to the deliberate desecration that he lavished on his deceased enemies’ remains—including feeding the bulk of the carcasses to Misery and the wargs—he treated his family’s remains with utmost respect.

If someone had said that his folks’ remains were nothing but garbage, he wouldn’t be offended. Sometimes though, a warrior does things that are of no Earthly use and he does it with utmost sincerity and attention to detail.

There was no need to turn their home into a mausoleum. It really mattered not at all, but it seemed a bit orcish. Instead he went deeper into the passage and he went into the first branching dead end and reformed the stone into four vaults—for he’d also brought along Misery’s human companion.

He carved a caption that said, “Here my beloved sleep, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection.”

Pear also excavated a depression big enough to be an Olympic sized swimming pool. The spring wouldn’t have been anywhere near adequate to fill the pool, so Pear used his water attribute to fill his pool.

It only took Pear a few days to get his home base into order. Now it was time to cultivate the dragon’s blood and tears.

There weren’t many bats in the cave, but there were a few. Pear snatched a rather large bat as it flew by and put a drop of the dragon’s tears in each of its eyes.

Contrary to what many erroneously believed, bats weren’t blind. They just were more dependent on their echolocation most of the time.

At any rate, Pear was reluctant to drop a potion into his eyes without testing it to some degree.

Pear used qi to hold the bat perfectly still and dropped a dragon tear into each of its eyes. Each teardrop bottle came with an eyedropper that worked on the same principle as the old-fashioned reusable glass syringes. The body was glass—or in this case, diamond—and there was a piston of diamond fitted closely enough to be air-tight.

Within thirty seconds, the bats eyes had grown about fifty percent larger and he used them to look all around. He’s also advanced from being a mundane bat to becoming a spirit beast bat at Level-1.

Pear placed the bat in a cage that he’d prepared for it. Eventually Pear had five bats staying in five cages.

If the bats hadn’t advanced to becoming spirit beasts, Pear would simply have let them go with greatly augmented eyesight and vitality. Even their intelligence would be a bit improved. The thing was: Level-1 spirit beasts were targeted by lower level beasts because they did have some qi to be absorbed, even if it wasn’t much, and they were weak.

Pear used the dragon tears on each of his beasts and himself. Meanwhile, he didn’t turn the bats loose until he’d fed them up to Level-6 with some of the special dans he’d taken from the dragon’s treasure storehouses.

During the time that Pear was feeding the spirit bats up to Level-6, he prepared to absorb the dragon’s blood. The directions said to either drink one vial or to soak in a tub with one vial diluted by the tubful of water.

Pear used his fire attribute to heat the hot tub to pleasantly warm temperature and then he poured two of the vials into the tub, even though the pool was a bit on the small side even to hold one vial.

Then Pear poured two vials into a pewter pitcher that came from one of the merchant wagons. He chugged the dragon’s blood down and then quickly stepped into the pool before the blood could set his innards on fire.

According to the manual, the intense burning pain from the blood was illusionary and no actual burning or scorching took place. If he “double-dipped” he’d absorb more than he would absorb if he used the two methods at different times—but the pain would be much greater.

The beautiful thing about using the dragon blood was that it wouldn’t truly injure you and once you’d taken it, no matter how much it hurt there was no way to abort it. You just suffered the tortures of the damned for awhile and when the pain ended you’d be much stronger.

Pear had seen his parents and his uncle killed. He’d had his bear ripped out of him and he’d rode eighteen hours a day in grief and agony. He held any pain that the dragon’s blood could create in contempt.

As the waves of spiritual fire washed over him, Pear didn’t try to block the pain out. Instead he welcomed it. He believed that enduring pain strengthened him. He’d have signed up for a visitor’s pass to the flaming floors of Hell if he thought that it would give him a better chance to defeat Crimson.

It wasn’t necessary to totally immerse yourself in the dragon water. The blood would be absorbed through the skin and would flow through all of the blood vessels. Nonetheless, Pear managed to occasionally duck his head beneath the water so that his face and scalp could get full benefits.

Submerging his head didn’t cause him to hurt any more, but neither did it alleviate any of the surging pulsating pain. He simply couldn’t hold any position for more than a few seconds.

A muscle with the ability to lift eighty percent of its maximum five to eight times is more than strong enough to rip the tendon loose from the bone with a one hundred percent strength spasm. There are pain receptors that prevent the muscle from destroying itself. At least it isn’t easy for it to do so.

Pear’s muscles were hyper stimulated and the rolling waves of pain invalidated the protective shut-off reflex. He felt his fingers cramp and then break themselves as well as ripping tendons loose from their attachments.

Then his biceps, pectorals, calves and hamstrings self-destructed. The dragon blood healed the damaged muscles and bones just in time for them to be ripped apart once more.

There were other things beside the muscles and bone that was broken down and then built up over and over again becoming stronger and more efficient each time. Pear only felt intense pain as the same process worked on his intestines, liver, kidneys, testicles, lungs and nerve cells amongst other things.

He couldn’t help thrashing around like a drowning alley cat that had been injected with large quantities of crystal meth before being tossed into boiling grease. Nonetheless, he strove to keep his senses open and to invite in as much soul fortifying pain into his consciousness as possible.

Eventually the pain started to decrease and finally it ceased. Pear had exhausted all of his various qis as well as most of his body’s natural reserves of energy. He managed to crawl out of the tub and then simply lay limply on the stone floor.

After he took a couple of qi restorers and rested a half hour he finally felt up to pulling a large towel from his qiankun pouch and drying himself off. He let the towel lay where he dropped it and summoned a staff to use as a support as he staggered to his bed.

Once he was recovered though, he tested his strength. His ice torrent had been at 300-degrees below zero—cold enough to freeze oxygen into a liquid. He had dropped the temperature down to 335-degrees below zero. That was cold enough to turn nitrogen into a liquid and it was close to the point of creating solid nitrogen.

Solid nitrogen at 346-degrees below zero was no big deal, but at 435-degrees below zero, hydrogen would turn into a solid. Regular solid hydrogen wasn’t terribly awe inspiring except for its extreme coldness. Metallic hydrogen would make a bang-up weapon, except it needed both very cold temperatures and very high pressures to exist.

Never mind. When Pear’s ice attribute got powerful enough to freeze hydrogen solid, his qi could supply the pressure.

The temperature of his red flame had gone up to 3500-degrees—hot enough to melt titanium or platinum. Both of Pear’s streams had gotten thicker, were under higher pressure and could last longer. His burn was up to thirty-nine seconds while his freeze was up to forty-seven seconds. Even the temperature of his nearly inexhaustible but low intensity orange flame had gone up to 2300-degrees—just hot enough to melt cast iron.

There wasn’t even a good way to categorize the improvements to his physical body. He just knew that he was far stronger than before.

************* ************** ************************

“The dragon said that consuming the blood wouldn’t be painful for spirit beasts. Let’s see if that’s true,” Pear said.

He poured a vial into a small wooden bowl and placed the bowl into the first bat’s cage and watched. The bat flew down and started lapping up the blood. A bat that was roughly the size of a raven shouldn’t have the capacity to drink all of the blood at one go—though the blood would never dry or go stale. Pear intended to leave the bowl in the cage until the bat had fully consumed its contents, but that didn’t take nearly as long as he’d thought that it might.

Pear shrugged and removed the bowl. He refilled it and put it into the next bat’s cage. All five bats had drunk a vial’s worth of dragon’s blood in less than an hour.

Pear poured another vial into the tub. Once it was thoroughly dispersed, he gathered about a gallon’s worth into a watering pitcher and thoroughly inundated each bat in turn. He re-watered the catatonic bats every hour or so for several hours.

“If nothing untoward happens to the bats, y’all can drink some blood tomorrow,” Pear told his beasts.

*********** ************** ******************

The bats seemed fine the next morning. They had grown about thirty percent larger and they all seemed to have gained a level. Pear placed one last beast dan on the floor of each cave.

“Once you eat your pill, you’re free to go,” Pear told them as he left their cage open.

Pear cubed some raw python meat and placed it into a series of bowls. He poured a vial full of dragon’s blood into each bowl and presented on to each of the wargs and Misery as well as the two Lion cubs.

“Billy, do you want yours poured onto corn, oats or some such?” Pear asked.

“Meat is fine,” Billy replied.

“Alright then,” Pear said and served a bowl full of giant bear meat to Billy along with a vial’s worth of dragon blood.

The bats had all flown away by nightfall. Level-7 bats with dragon tear enhanced eyesight and the effects of consuming and showering in dragon blood should be capable of looking out after themselves.

A beast’s power wasn’t always proportional to its size. While Pear had no idea what type of bloodline power the bats might have, they should be quite capable of protecting themselves.

The beasts all seemed to need several days to sleep off their drugs. Pear let them sleep and busied himself with other things.

The cave seemed to have some sort of indirect lighting, but it didn’t seem to be enough to support plant growth.

Plants generally needed light to grow and prosper, but in Pear’s world that didn’t always hold true. Some nominally photosynthesizing plants could mutate to live off of the energy of heaven and earth qi instead of sunlight.

Pear amused himself while his beasts slept, by mutating some plant seeds with his wood attribute.

He liked pentagons. He placed five Granny Smith apple saplings on the points of a pentagon and planted a red delicious at the center of the pentagon. Then Pear planted six cherry trees and six pecan trees.

The trees had been altered to use yuan qi and the water and earth rich attribute qi overflowed the hot tub eventually. Pear routed the overflow through his small orchard.

The trees would grow more slowly than regular trees and it would take them a very long time to bear a few fruits—but each fruit or nut would be an extreme cultivating treasure.

Pear didn’t expect the trees to bear fruit in his lifetime, but he enjoyed the feeling of leaving treasures for someone else to find someday.

There were books about formations among Nandi’s library and Pear had picked up a few more in the massive library of the dragon. Formations had much in common with the Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs—though they usually featured far more complicated systems of lines rather than the quit-pattern like hex signs.

Formations could serve as early warning systems. They could create labyrinthine illusions that were very hard to escape and they could act as collectors and compressors of yuan qi—or other qi.

The cave was already fairly rich in qi. Pear used his earth attribute to etch qi condensing patterns in the stone floor and on the stone walls. Sometimes he’d form a pit 6’ deep and place a qi gathering every foot as he filled it up once more.

The qi in the whole series of chambers that the friends used as living quarters became very rich. Each of the trees was the focus of a series of qi gathering formations. Pear’s pool and his tub were also the centers of qi gathering arrays. The stone platform where Pear habitually cultivated was the richest of all the qi vortexes.

************ ************** ********************

The first bat that Pear had captured returned after a few days. It flew into his cage and hung itself on its perch.

Pear laughed heartily and then he threw the bat another beast dan.

He removed two of the cage’s walls so that the bat could come and go as he pleased and still use the perch that he’d become accustomed to.

In a few days, his beasts come out of their hibernation. Nimbi and Nandi had gained the ability to speak. Nimbi had a pleasant mellow bass voice that sounded a bit odd coming from a female. Nandi’s voice was a couple octaves lower than any human’s speaking voice and it sounded a bit harsh and grating.

Nimbi loved her voice and she enjoyed using it, while Nandi forbore speaking and preferred to use mind speak.

Billy had become a Level-10 beast and he’d grown to about 18-hands tall. He had gotten thicker and he was muscled like the old steroid fed Belgian Blue bulls. Curiously, his golden horns bent into a full sweeping curve like a bighorn sheep.

Misery had also advanced to Level-10, but he hadn’t yet gotten a voice. Billy was a very powerful Level-10 while Misery had just barely climbed on a new plateau.

Lime had grown until he weighed over 250-pounds while Flame still hovered around 45-pounds. When the awoke from the long sleep, Flame had a humongous knot on the end of his tail. Lime didn’t have a knot on the end of his tail, but he had a grapefruit sized bony lump on his left shoulder.

“I’m afraid that Flame may turn out to be some sort of runt,” Pear said.

“Red three-eyed winged lions always are midgets. On the other hand, in addition to extremely hot flames they also have the gift of finding treasure,” Nimbi said.

“Really? Do you know anything about those growths on each of them?’ Pear asked.

“No. I have never heard of such a thing. However, I can tell you that they seem to be normal and healthy tissue—not a cyst, cancer or abscess,” Nimbi said.

Pear arranged for the beasts to soak in diluted dragon blood one at a time. First of all, if the bath caused them to go into another three-week hibernation, he didn’t want to be left with no one to talk to. Second. The wargs and billy were very large. Even Misery was the size of a large Shetland pony nowadays. Third, he wanted to regulate their doses.

The blood wouldn’t spoil, but the tub did have an overflow. It was debatable how much dragon blood was still in the tub after all this time. Homeopathy had no more validity in Pear’s time than it did in any other time or place.

Pear poured two vials into the tub and asked Nandi to soak. Nandi himself was the best judge of how much he was capable of absorbing and when to climb out.

Pear was amused when the now eagle-sized bat flew over to soak with Nandi. Nandi didn’t seem to mind, so Pear let them be.

The bat flew to his perch when Nandi exited. Pear refreshed the tub with another vial of dragon blood and called Nimbi to soak. As soon as Nimbi was comfortably settled in, the bat flew over once more to share the soak.

When everyone except Lime and Flame had soaked, Pear poured in two vials and had them soak together. Their fluorescent bodies both seemed to positively glow when they exited the tub.

The bat had grown too large for his perch and it came crashing down with him. Pear shook his head and set him up another larger perch.

“From now on, your name is ‘Swipe’,” Pear told the bat.

The bat now had a 9’ wingspan and his body was the size of the largest of domestic turkeys.

Pear thought for a moment. According to the attribute world view, matter, energy and qi were simply vibrations in the nonexistent subluminous aether. Sound was strange, because sound is vibration. By attribute paradigm, it was a vibration superimposed upon another vibration.

Nonetheless, there was sound attribute qi and attribute cultivators who used sound attribute qi. The practice seemed very obscure and hard to visualize to Pear and he paid scant attention to sound jutsu.

That didn’t mean that he hadn’t picked up a double handful of sound attribute qi rings when he rifled through the dragon’s treasure warehouses. Missed opportunities rarely came again.

Pear took two sound attribute rings with honking big blue topaz stones chock full of sound attribute qi. Swipe had three fingers on the upper side of his wing. They were vestigial and had little or no use, but when Pear placed two sound attribute rings and two blood and bone wings on the tiny fingers, the rings shrank to fit snuggly.

Then Pear read the pamphlet about cultivating sound qi as well as four martial jutsu for sound attribute to the bat. He was reasonably sure that the bat could understand human language.

It was time to cultivate. However, Flame wouldn’t let Pear alone. The lion cubs had paws that could morph into clever little hands when the wanted to grasp something. Flame kept turning his paws into hands and pointing at the fingers of one hand with the index finger of the other hand.

“I get it. You want an attribute ring too. Is that, right?” Pear asked.

Pear sighed and called more of the nearly priceless attribute rings out of the spatial ring residing inside the velvet qiankun pouch.

He placed three fire ruby rings on Flame’s chubby fingers, two sapphire wind rings and two extra thick blood and bone rings.

“You heard me read the cultivation method to Swipe. Go and cultivate. I’ll read you some martial jutsu tomorrow. Right now, I need to cultivate. Can he cultivate?” Pear directed the question to Nimbi.

“I’m surprised, but the fact that he asked for the rings seems sufficient evidence that he can. Spirit beasts seem to have a built-in awareness of their capabilities,” Nimbi said.

“How about you and Nandi? Do you have built-in instincts?” Pear asked.

“Nandi and I aren’t spirit beasts. Someday you will learn what we truly are and I dread that day. You won’t want us to be your companions anymore once you know,” Nimbi said.

“If you’re not comfortable telling me, then don’t. I love both of you. I’d have died long ago without your aid and mentoring. I will never turn my back on you. I’m ashamed that I never told my Uncle Jared that I loved him until the very end. I love all of you: Billy, Misery, Flame and Lime. Swipe, if you hang around much longer then you will become part of our family too,” Pear said.

“Lime, come over here. I don’t want to leave you out,” Pear said.

Pear had no idea what type of attribute that Lime had, so he laid a big handful of attribute rings out for him to choose from. He picked three blood and bone rings, two wood attribute rings, two water attribute rings and a wind attribute ring. He chose the very best rings that Pear had set out for him and he placed them on his fingers himself.

The lion cub had little wings the size of pigeon wings growing from their backs. They were far too small to support the lions’ weight. Even Flame’s wings were too small to support his weight—even though his wings were as large as Lime’s and his bodyweight was far less.

However, despite the principles of aerodynamics, both of them could rise a few feet into the air and hover for a handful of seconds by flapping the tiny wings very vigorously. Obviously, some sort of qi manipulation was going on.

Pear returned to his cultivating leaving the strange lion cubs to their own devices.

Pear was working hard on the third tier of martial jutsu for his fire and ice. The third tier was to create weapons from the attribute qi.

He glared at the granite practice columns that he’d formed with his earth attribute and a saber of flame with a 5’ long blade formed in his left hand while a buckler and a mercy dagger of flame formed in his right hand.

He slashed at the 3’ in diameter round pillar of granite. The flame bladed saber cut through the stone post as if it were made of cotton candy. The cut surfaces were optically smooth, reflecting light like a polished mirror.

Either the edge of his buckler or his mercy dagger could also slash effortlessly through the stones.

Pear had set up a path that he walked through every day smashing and slashing wood and stone pillars with his weapons. Unfortunately, he spent more time reconstituting his dummies than he did practicing techniques. That wasn’t all bad. His wood and earth attribute dexterity improved greatly.

************* *************** *********************

“I was planning on giving each of you another vial of dragon’s blood and let you take another soak, before I go by to see the dragon and take my leave. In the meantime, the lion cubs have assimilated their rings and I think that they could benefit from another dose right now. Does anyone else feel the urge?” Pear asked.

Pear had been taking a one ounce shot of dragon’s blood every morning. He also rubbed his hands and forearms raw and then daubed a bit of dragon blood on them every morning. While neither of those activities was pain free, they weren’t anything nearly so agonizing as his initial exposure. That was partly because the quantities were smaller, but mostly it was because Pear’s body had come to partially accept infusions of dragon blood and qi.

Although he still planned on waiting until he was preparing to leave to drink and soak, his friends progress made him think that they could profit from an intermediate swallow and soak.

None of the other beasts except for Swipe wanted to consume more dragon’s blood.

Pear treasured the Level-18 bear meat. He planned to use a big meal as a last-minute power-up before they arrived at the wedding tournament. But he still had more than enough for a big feast for everyone today.

The friends feasted on bear meat and then Pear set a mixed bowl of raw python and raw giant smoldering coal bear cubes covered with a vial’s worth of dragon’s blood before Flame, Lime and Swipe. Swipe had grown again and handling the 2’’ cubes of spirit beast meat wouldn’t be a problem even for him.

Bat’s legs are generally too weak to support the bat’s weight except in suspension. However, as Swipe levelled up, his legs grew stronger and he often walked around upright in a gait reminiscent of an emperor penguin’s.

Pear was shocked a few days later when the spirit beasts came out of hibernation.

Flame had a half-sized head on the end of his tail. His tail was longer now and it was as thick as Pear’s wrist. The head had three-eyes, a nose, mouth and ears. He wasn’t sure if it had its own heart and lungs, but it definitely had an air-sack of some sort and vocal cords because it could let out ear-piercing shrieks.

Flame’s wings were still too small for his body, but they had grown to the size of a redtailed hawk’s wings in the last few days and Flame could climb higher and hover longer.

He spewed napalm qi from his mouth much like Pear sprayed napalm qi from his palms. Flame’s fire stream was marginally hotter and longer lasting than Pear’s. The smaller half-sized head could also spew fire. It lost out a bit to the heat and volume of Pear’s flame, but the small head’s flame was inexhaustible.

The small head could guard Flame’s rear or it could swivel forward and fire over Flame’s shoulder. When Flame chose to stand upright on two legs—which was most of the time—the small head could also coil around and shoot under Flame’s arm or between his legs.

When the small head spewed fire between Flame’s legs, it looked like Flame was pissing fire.

“He seems to have picked up your second-tier fire jutsu simply by watching you train,” Nimbi remarked.

The red lion cub seemed to have advanced to a very solid and powerful Level-7.

“Flame, that’s mighty good. However, just because something is good—or even great—doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved. I’ll read the whole book of fire jutsu to you later, and you can use the methods to strengthen your flame and to learn and master new attacks and defenses,” Pear said to Flame.

“Now let’s see what you’ve got,” Pear said to Lime.

Lime looked like he’d grown to 350-pounds or so. Never mind that he’d been asleep and hadn’t taken in anywhere near enough raw material to grow so much. Qi was perfectly capable of forming matter—such as bones, blood, muscles and innards.

Lime now had two perfectly formed heads. The necks supporting the heads was both thicker and a good deal longer than a normal lion’s neck. The heads seemed to be about 10 or 15-degrees off of the midline. That meant that the right head could look a little farther to the right rear, while the left head could see things a little further to the left, but there was still plenty of overlap in the center.

Pear tried to imagine seeing the world through six powerful eyes with a huge parallax between the eyes on the left head and the eyes on the right head.

He stood on two feet and his tail grew extraordinarily long—maybe 20 or 25’. Lime’s right hand grasped the tail close to its base and he used it like a green blacksnake whip. It made cracking noises that sounded like thunder and the whip shattered the wood as well as the stone pillars that Pear had created to practice on.

Meanwhile, Lime used his green qi to create a gargantuan green mace in his left hand in case someone penetrated his guard.

All the while Lime plied his whip, he laughed maniacally like a thoroughly demented human.

“Do you have any good defenses,” Pear challenged Lime.

For a moment, Lime looked like he was going to split into two one-legged halves. A divide started at his shoulders and went all the way down to within a mere 2 or 3’’ from his pelvis.

Both halves bent toward their perspective side until both of Lime’s hands touched the ground. Then after a brief pause, the halves snapped back together with a sort of rubbery “sprang!” noise. You could see the fierce vibrations the slam together caused as Lime’s hands trembled from the force of forcibly reintegrating his upper torso.

He looked at Pear with a wide grin and laughed manically once more. He couldn’t yet speak, but he mumbled incoherencies between frantic outbursts of laughing.

Swipe had actually grown smaller. He was now the size of a large raven once more. He flew at some of Pear’s granite practice girders. He sent out two sonic bursts so strong that they were momentarily visible—at least to Pear’s enhanced eyesight—and he shattered two stone pillars to either side of him while he shattered and flew through the pillar straight in front of him by relying on pure brute force.

Pear threw each of the three a premium level-raising beast dan and gestured for all three to get into the hot tub. Pear allowed one vial for each of the beasts and added one more for good measure.

Pear climbed into the tub once the beasts were through. The tub did have an overflow and the beasts had absorbed much of the tub’s efficacy, but there was still a bit left and Pear was loath to waste it.

************ *************** ********************

Once again Pear was training his martial jutsu. Try as he would, he just couldn’t form his metallic hydrogen into a saber. The ice attribute seemed determined to form a long and tapered ice sickle lance.

The lance could be used as a 4’ long assegai or it could grow to a 9’ long infantry man’s pike—or any length between. The lance’s ability to penetrate was awe inspiring and even though it was a long pointy cone without any sort of edge, it could slash like a halberd due to the shearing effect of its extreme cold.

Pear had no trouble creating a buckler on his left hand. When he used the spear with his left foot and hand forward, the strapped-on buckler provided some protection to the backside of his left hand and wrist.

The lance wasn’t at all heavy so Pear could wield the lance in his right hand and his flame saber in his left. When he did so, there was a flame buckler strapped to his right hand and a metallic hydrogen buckler strapped to the back of his left hand.

Generally, ice and fire attribute wouldn’t tolerate such close proximity, but since both the fire attribute and the ice attribute were friends of Pear, they had no issues with working closely together when Pear asked them to.

That was not to say that Pear’s attributes had become sentient at that point or that Pear spoke to them in words. Rather, they smoothly followed Pear’s intent.

Pear finished the day’s exercise working with the relatively cool orange flame qi. Since there was so much of it, even raising its ambient temperature by 100-degrees or so could wield large dividends. Pear was also trying to perfect a red flame attack supported on all sides by the weaker orange flames.

On the spectrum of radiating bodies, orange would be hotter than red, but that had nothing to do with the two similar attributes.

After Pear finished his workout, Swipe landed on Pear’s shoulder. He perched precariously on one foot, while he used the fingers of that foot to point at the residual digits on his wing. And yes, the digits on his foot were too long and dexterous to be considered toes.

“You want more attribute rings? You’re not the least bit greedy—are you?” Pear laughed.

He showed Swipe a handful of attribute rings. Swipe unhesitantly selected six fire attribute rubies and placed one on each of his residual digits. Then he took two wind attribute rings, another blood and bone ring, a wood attribute ring and another sonic attribute ring.

Pear shrugged. He had enough emperor grade attribute rings to fill a couple of bushel baskets. He had no shortage and anyway, he planned to get more when he went back to the dragon’s lair. As the proverb said:

“More is more better.”

Swipe found a perch where he could hang upside down, wrapped his wings all around himself and went into a beast mode cultivating hibernation.

When he emerged from his hibernation, he had a pair of manlike arms in addition to his wings. On the other hand, he now had three legs—with the third leg set further back forming a tripod with the two forward legs.

‘That’s odd enough,’ Pear thought to himself.

Swipe manifested a pair of mini-long swords composed of black flames—yes! Black flames!

Swipe proceeded to smash a number of Pear’s practice pillars with his 11’’ long swords and then he sprayed them with his logic-bashing black flames from his palms or his mouth.

“Damned nation dude! It is like:

‘really man, be for real!’” Pear said.

He drifted back into gentleman speak in his excitation. English didn’t seem adequate so he added:

“Wie wirklich Mann, sei echt! ¡Realmente hombre, sé real!"

“I profited from you reading the fire cultivation and martial jutsu that you read to the lion cub,” Swipe said in an emotionless voice like the tone adopted by the elders in one of the stoic sects.

“That’s cool dude. What are your plans now? You’re welcome to go or stay. I just hope that we can stay friends,” Pear said.

“Are you kidding? I’m going to raise my power along with everyone else so I can support you in nylen land,” Swipe said.

“Okay…”

[rvm45]

Chapter Seven








When it was time to leave, Pear loaded some of his things back into his bag. He left the library of books and the bookshelves because he still had the originals and he could always create more copies of books and fine display cases. It was really rather enjoyable and relaxing to do so.

He also left the bed and other furniture that he’s created with earth and/or wood attribute. He even left a handful of attribute rings and some high level dans.

Someday, some lucky fellow might stumble upon this place. Perhaps by then, some of the plants that Pear had nurtured would have spirit fruits or nuts hanging upon them.

*********** ************* *********************

Pear stood in front of the dragon once more.

“I’m impressed. You have made excellent progress in the last few years, and you’ve added a powerful ally. Still, I think that you still fall a bit short,” the dragon said.

“Let your friends follow my lead. I’ll take each of them somewhere they can quickly raise their fighting strength while we have a long talk. O, and don’t worry about making it to the tournament on time. I can send you through a wormhole in space that will save you ten to twelve weeks of travel time,” the dragon said.

“Do you have a name?” Pear asked.

“I have a name. Your vocal cords couldn’t hit some of the low notes and it would take you a half an hour to say it, even if you had the vocal apparatus. We live on a far different scale than humans—in time as well as in size. Nonetheless, you may need to drop my name at some point in the future, so I will download it into your memory where you can ponder it,” the dragon said.

“Thank you.”

That was the only thing that Pear could think of to say.

“Have the wargs shared an awesome secret with you?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Pear said.

“If they had, you would know. It isn’t mine to tell. The wargs will tell you something soon that will break your mind. How strong that you can stay after that shock will determine whether you win against Lord Crimson or whether he defeats you,” the dragon told Pear.

“Now, I have some ways to greatly increase your strength.”

********* ************* *********************

Pear was noticeably more powerful when the friends assembled together once more. So were each of his beasts. Misery’s teeth and toenails were now a pale shade of bronze and he seemed to have grown ten or fifteen percent larger. The lion cubs had also gained metallic claws and teeth—probably mid-range magical silver. Lime had grown larger as well. Flame however, was destined to remain a runt all of his life.

“Pear, your hair and your eyes!” Nimbi exclaimed.

Pear called up a small hand mirror to examine himself. Pear’s hair had always been of a shiny gold color, but now there were locks of intense metallic blue-green mixed in with the gold on one side of Pear’s head, while the other side of his head had locks of bright metallic burgundy.

His irises had always been gold colored, but now his eyes had increased to the size of hen’s eggs and they had distinctive bony prominences all around to protect them, since they now protruded a bit.

All that was tangential to the fact that Pear’s pupils were now a vertical lens-shaped slit like a cat’s pupil.

“Okay…” Pear said while studying the new face in the mirror. He was pleased to note that the scar that gave his features a sinister cast was still present. If anything, the corded scar was now in bolder relief and redder.

********** ************* *******************

After the teleportation, the friends had landed close to a small town. The friends headed towards the town to buy a map and inquire about their whereabouts. If Pear presented himself as someone who’d spent the last few years in the forest as a nomadic beast hunter, no one would be surprised that he had no idea where he was.

Pear walked into an emporium that catered to cultivators, particularly cultivators who hunted spirit beasts and cultivation treasures. He had left everyone outside except Flame. The small lion wasn’t content unless he was riding on Pear’s back.

The wargs, Misery, Lime, Billy and Swipe had stayed outside. Swipe had gotten in the habit of hanging upside-down from one of Billy’s spiraling horns—and never mind how ridiculous it looked.

“Pardon me, do you have any detailed maps of the area?” Pear asked one of the clerks.

“Do you want to sell that red three-eyed winged lion cub?” the clerk asked.

The response seriously rubbed Pear the wrong way. He loathed people with swapitus.

Occasionally Pear would encounter a man who loved to say—with no apparent provocation:

“Everything I’ve got is for sale, if the price is right.”

Pear believed that a man who ran around saying things like that—while he might not consciously realize it himself—would sell his wife to a brothel, his children to a slaver, his honor—and get right down to it, even his nuts—if someone bid high enough.

Pear understood the concept of growing food, forging weapons or simply buying goods with malice of forethought, to sell later for a profit. However, he thought of the objects that framed his daily life, as close friends who stuck with him through thick and thin.

He might give a treasured item to a friend—just so long as the friend didn’t suffer from swapitus. He might solemnly set a worn-out tool or object aside with a heartfelt sigh.

But basically, absolutely nothing that Pear had was for sale for any price. He found it insulting to be asked. To his way of thinking, people with swapitus were whores and he hated being mistaken for a whore.

All of that was leaving aside the fact that Flame was alive and he was family.

Pear abruptly turned to leave. There were other shops in the town. Presumably, there were shops that might sell him a map without implying that he was a whore.

“Stop him!” the clerk shouted.

Four beefy guards moved to block the entrance. Pear supposed that the guards were simply doing their jobs. That wasn’t a mitigating circumstance so far as Pear was concerned. It was a strongly aggravating circumstance.

Pear managed to leave all four of the guards lying on the floor and bleeding—without permanently crippling any of them. If he’d maimed anyone, he’d feel compelled to do the merciful thing and set their spirits free. For some reason, folks got all upset when you sent someone on the longest journey.

Just as Pear had stepped onto the cobblestone street, he felt a massive blast of both wind and qi from the emporium and a scrawny robed old man with long silvery hair flew out of the emporium and blocked Pear’s way.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

“Dude, it is like: I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Pear said lapsing into gentleman’s dialect.

“But I will like tell you. I only wanted to buy a map and possibly sell a few herbs. This lopslicker offered to buy my brother Flame. When I turned to leave in after he insulted me, he sicced these numb-nuts onto me,” Pear explained.

“Now get out of my way,” Pear said.

“The guards acted in good faith,” the old man accused.

“I know that. That’s why I didn’t cut them any slack. Now get out of my way,” Pear said while knowing deep down that it simply wasn’t going to happen.

The silver haired elder looked at the hapless clerk.

“Did you try to prevent a customer, who hadn’t committed any wrong against the emporium from leaving?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry Uncle Clem! I was hurried and didn’t have the time to think it through,” The young man stuttered.

There was a loud pop and the clerk fell to the cobbled ground writhing in agony.

“Uncle Clem! You destroyed my dantian!” the clerk wailed in pain and grief.

‘Why can’t anything ever be simple?’ Pear thought to himself

The old cultivator hit Pear with a palm heel strike aiming to destroy his dantian as well. It wasn’t even a very hard blow to Pear’s dragon enhanced bear physique.

“I’ll give you an ‘E’ for effort. The thing is: I don’t have a dantian you castrating knob-gobbler!” Pear said.

“Let me see if I can figure out how this works,” Pear said as if trying hard to puzzle something out.

He executed a stiff-fingered left-hand jab that penetrated deep into the old cultivator’s solar plexus and after groping around momentarily he ripped the man’s heart out.

“Damned Nation!” Pear spat out. “I guess I haven’t mastered that dantian-busting strike yet!”

Pear pretended to be genuinely puzzled as he stared with open-mouth at the still beating heart as if it confused him somehow.

“Nandi!” Pear alerted the big male warg as he threw the heart at him to eat.

Pear loaded the old man’s corpse into a spatial ring. There were finger bones to harvest and skin, and the carcass was good warg meat—well, not really. The meat would be old, bony and filled with gristle.

Pear showed everyone a vial of dragon’s blood.

“Whoever sells me a good set of maps for this area gets this vial of dragon’s blood,” Pear shouted.

He had hundreds of vials in his rings and velvet qiankun bag and he had access to tens of thousands of vials back in the dragon’s lair. He would rather overpay and have the maps delivered to him on the street, than to try to shop peacefully after he’d shown the whole town his rosy-red ass.

One lucky adventurer presented Pear with a large selection of maps of this area as well as maps of many adjacent areas and even a few distant areas.

The middle-aged adventurer seemed to have thirteen younger cultivators in his gang.

Pear looked them over.

“I’m not sure that any of y’all could survive drinking this vial. However, if it was me, I’d dilute the blood in a hot tub and have your whole gang soak in it,” Pear told them.

Pear also reminded the man that until he’d used up the dragon’s blood that he’d be the target of the covetous.

************* ************* ******************

The old adventurer’s name was Warm.

Warm gathered his regulars as well as a couple part-timers who were also in town. He went to the mercenary guild and hired twenty guards. Then he marched to a bath house with a mid-sized tub and made arrangements to rent the whole building for a month. Since he gave more than enough platinum coins to buy the bath house outright, the tradesmen were more than happy to rent the bath to Warm for a month.

Pear had slipped a standard qiankun bag full of coins and dans into Warm’s hand in addition to the vial of dragon’s blood. Pear didn’t like to do things halfway, and if Warm couldn’t consume the dragon’s blood rather quickly, the odds were that someone would try to snatch it from him.

The mercenaries weren’t incorruptible, but they were unlikely to act too ruthlessly within the town. Ruined reputations would seriously erode their earning power.

Amongst the other goodies in the bag was a couple of bottles of the dragon tears.

Inside the bath house, Warm placed a drop of dragon’s tears into everyone’s eyes. Then he had them use the tears as nose-drops. This greatly enhanced vision and the sense of smell.

Arguably, human beast hunters would probably benefit more from hearing enhancement rather than smell enhancement, or even vision enhancement. No enhanced sense was without value in the wilds though.

Warm had warned everyone that while the bath would be very beneficial to both their body and their cultivation, that it was incredibly painful. The good news—at least in the long run—was that once one had entered the tub, even if they had a failure of will, they’d still be unable to halt the process.

Most of the men stripped naked. Most of the women retained the equivalent of a bra and panties. It wasn’t as if anyone would be feeling any thoughts of lust or concupiscence once the pain set in. Anyway, months or years of living roughly in the forest had rid the women of much of their modesty.

Everyone followed the directions and dunked their heads under water and scrubbed the spiked water into their face and scalp before the pain began.

Three days later the friends started to climb feebly out of the hot tub. The weakest among them had benefitted the most—comparatively—but even the strongest felt the benefits of stronger bones, quickened marrow and healing throughout their body. Many subtle internal knots of scar tissue formed over the years was gently untangled and put right.

Warm was a six-step cultivator who’d been stuck at the bottleneck of advancing to Beta-5 for over eight years. He advanced from Beta-4 to Gamma-2 in the three days of scalding agony in the tub.

The stronger cultivators came out about a third stronger while some of the weaker cultivators increased their power and level over fifty-percent. Everyone had advanced at least three levels, though Warm was the only one to advance into a higher realm. All of their physical bodies were strengthened. Also, their cultivation speed and their ability to comprehend went up by at least fifteen percent.

Warm handed everyone a spatial ring filled with cultivation treasures and he gave everyone a top-quality weapon. A few lucky ones got two weapons.

His next action was to pour a second partially filled vial into the tub and call the mercenaries inside. They were now down to sixteen men.

“Y’all did a good job of protecting us. There is still some vitality left in the pool,” Warm said.

It was true enough. There would have been enough dragon essence in the pool to benefit the guards even if Warm hadn’t added more blood. Now, for all practical purposes, the pool was as rich as it had been when Warm’s gang got in.

“Why did you do that?” Warm’s segundo asked— but only after the guards were paralyzed by the agony.

Silver was Warm’s segundo despite her youth and she took her name from the long metallic silver hair that hung halfway down her back.

Warm shrugged.

“We’re going to have to run a gauntlet to get out of this town and into the forest where our skills will give us an advantage,” Warm said.

“Those guards were going to be our first hurdle. O sure, I can tell everyone that we have already consumed the blood, but would they believe that we have no other treasures? In point of fact, each of you does have several minor treasures—so their assumption isn’t unreasonable,” Warm explained.

While he talked he laid a number of formations drawn on parchment around the pool.

“What are you doing?” Silver asked.

“The guards won’t be able to come out of the pool for a full seven days now. They won’t suffer too much. In fact, there will still be a few leftover corners of power if anyone wants to take the trouble to absorb them,” Warm explained.

“We’re going to take some of these pills and consolidate our gains for the next couple of days. Then we’re going to put on the mercenary uniforms and march out of here,” Warm said.

“People will see the bath unguarded and they will try to barge in to see if anything valuable has been left behind—only there will be several formation arrays to keep them out. When they finally do get in, they will see the guards who will be free of the pool by then, but trapped in the building until the crowd breaks through the outer foundations,” Warm said.

********** ************** **********************

Pear looked at the clerk with some irritation. The man was an aggravating ass, but Pear couldn’t see how he’d done anything evil enough to warrant having his dantian ruined. That implied an obligation to ameliorate the situation, since he had the power to do so.

Pear used his qi to knock the man out and he draped him across Billy’s saddle like a big sack of feed grain.

He asked the wargs to scout ahead and find a cave. They couldn’t find a cave nearby, so Pear created a cultivator’s cave in the side of a mansion-sized boulder using his earth attribute.

“Nimbi, is there any way that I can place a beast core inside this goober without having him awaken? I don’t want to have to listen to him,” Pear said.

It turned out that both the formations and the hand seals were different for an outside operator, but the procedure was doable.

Pear looked at a Level-7 transparent beast core, but he decided to be stingy and only give the clerk a more powerful and expensive Level-8 core.

Once the Level-8 core was implanted in the man. Pear slipped a big fire ruby ring on all of the fingers of the clerk’s right hand. He placed one blue sapphire wind attribute ring and three blood and bone rings on the fingers of the man’s left hand.

He left the man several books. Most notably, he left five copies of “Cultivating Without a Dantian.” In the note that he left the man, he explained that while he no longer needed the book, since a very powerful beast core was replacing his dantian, that handing out the book to people in need would constitute partial payment for services rendered.

Pear placed several formations on the floor and walls of the tiny cave to attract and concentrate yuan qi. He threw out a futon, two wool blankets and two sheets and he left a qiankun bag with ample provisions and a few low and mid-level goodies in it.

Once outside, Pear laid foundations to hide the entrance and to seal the man inside for seven weeks. He had more than enough food and water to last him that long and he needed to take some time to fully adapt to his new energy storage system.

Pear placed a necklace made from the finger bones of his “uncle” around the formerly neutered cultivator’s neck. He also included the man’s eye teeth and the bones from his big toes, since otherwise the necklace would look rather skimpy. Of course, Pear added the standard complement of semiprecious beads to the necklace.

When the mundane tanned hide it took some time. Pear could use his qi to “instant-tan” something. He left a pair of gloves tanned from the boss man’s hand skin. If the clerk didn’t value the gloves, he could sell them to some daemonic cultivator or someone who simply liked the outré.

If he rushed out, he might very well fall prey to the first predatory cultivator that he happened upon. If he sat in the cave for seven weeks and did nothing but twiddled his thumbs to the exclusion of all else and was robbed and murdered upon emerging, it wouldn’t be because Pear was remiss.

Pear didn’t mind being a good Samaritan, but he didn’t take the money-grubbing clerk to raise.

************ *************** *********************

A few days later, Pear was riding Nimbi while Lime assumed humanoid form and was riding Billy. He laughed occasionally as if a green three-eyed winged lion riding on a spirit bull was a huge joke on the whole world at large.

Flame alternated between sitting on Pear’s shoulders, flying or riding Nimbi or Misery. His wings spanned a good eight feet nowadays, but they retracted seamlessly into his shoulders when he wasn’t using them.

Swipe almost always perched or hung upside-down on one of Billy’s golden horns.

Pear sensed that someone was following them. He wasn’t unaware that two columns of men travelled parallel to the small party and then raced to get ahead of them.

A man appeared in front of them. He rode what amounted to an oversized whitetail deer. The spirit deer stayed in antlers year-round, and the antlers were quick like an elephant’s tusk or a boar’s tooth. The deer only dropped the horns and grew a new set when the old set was damaged enough to let the open air touch the exposed nerve and pulp that ran through the antler’s center.

The rear prongs could be a bit problematic. A rider could easily lose an eye if the deer tossed its head back. The deer riders solved the problem by cutting threads on the rearward pointing prongs and threading on brass balls the size of unshelled walnuts.

The metal balls both acted as intimidating spirit beast bling when the deer met other spirit animals, and they helped the deer to channel their qi.

The ranger was rather tall despite being hunchbacked and his mouth was full of brown rotting teeth. He was clad in ragged greasy buckskin and carried a weapon that looked like a double-edged woodcutter’s axe that had the handle sawn off.

“Howdy stranger,” the man said.

He smiled as if there was a hilarious subtext hidden in the greeting.

“Good morning,” Pear said.

“Morning? It’s late afternoon,” Brown Tooth said.

“I’m sure that it’s morning somewhere,” Pear said with a sour frown.

He always bid someone a good morning, because he didn’t know of any other greeting that carried so much optimism. In the morning, the day was a clean fresh canvas, ready to have a masterpiece painted upon it. Only later did it become irreparably ruined—just like every day that had preceded it, had also been ruined.

He had his reasons to prefer “Good morning” to other greetings, but he was becoming increasingly irritated when called to task over it. Couldn’t the shabnasticators simply accept a greeting of goodwill without dissecting it?

“I’ll buy that red lion cub from you,” the Brown Tooth said.

“No, you won’t. You and your whole gang don’t have enough to buy one hair from Flame’s ass. Go away,” Pear spat back.

“If you won’t sell it, then I’ll have to take it from you,” Brown Tooth said.

“Go away!” Pear said.

Finally, Pear couldn’t stand the sight of those brown teeth bared in an all-knowing grin any longer.

Pear was wearing over a dozen bead necklaces that he’d strung himself using mystic unbreakable silver thread. The necklaces had small marble-sized beads of pearl, turquoise, jade, ivory, amber, red coral and pea-sized beads of gold or faceted yellow topaz.

The main bulk of the necklaces came human finger bones. Nandi’s finger bones had beads and the claws and fangs from the giant smoldering coal bear and no other finger bones. The other necklaces were Pear’s way of showing disrespect to the remains of his enemies.

He grabbed a handful of necklaces and brandished them without taking them off. The mercenary leader recognized the bones and his face went a little pale. He must have thought that Pear was some sort of daemonic cultivator.

“Move or be moved,” Pear said.

The red lion cub stood up on Nimbi’s saddle. He pushed his tail forward between his legs and grabbed the neck of the tail head with his left hand. He arched his back and imitated the stance Pear used when urinating. He pissed fire all over the annoying human and deer roadblock—or trail block ahead.

The ranger apparently practiced some sort of fire technique, because although Flame’s conflagration seriously scorched the brigand, it didn’t reduce him to ashes as Flame thought that it would. The flames were quite enough to burn the deer to crumbling ashes though.

Pear was momentarily saddened at the fate of the deer. Nonetheless, since the deer was far less to blame, it deserved heavier punishment. It was a shame that death was the worst punishment Pear could give. Deliberately leaving someone or something maimed yet still alive was far worse than slaying it, but that was a line Pear would never cross—even if it cost him his life.

Therefore, the deer got off lightly, since it would be punished no more than the humans who were far more responsible for their actions.

Pear was almost bored as he raised his right hand and sent a blast of liquid helium at the fire cultivator. The man froze solid and he shattered into hundreds of icy white shards when Pear threw an ice ball at him at close to the speed of sound.

His small stock of patience exhausted, Pear ran through the rest of the freebooters like Samson slaying the Philistines. He conserved his fire and ice attacks and instead he slew with the saber, buckler and mercy dagger that Uncle Jared had commissioned for him.

Sadly, for men who were swordsmen, swords were a consumable resource. You could train with a sword for decades, but one hard duel could leave one’s sword looking like a cross-cut saw, ready to snap at the slightest provocation.

Pear could form a battle qi and both shield his blades from any contact with any adversarial blades and the battle qi was also sharper and more damaging than any cutting edge of steel.

Cultivators with the power to sheath their weapons in qi rarely fought with material weapons. It was kinda like an adult riding a tricycle. Pear was practicing sword craft and paying homage to his uncle’s teaching by using the left-handed cavalry saber.

When the gang of Brown Tooth had all been sent on the longest journey, Pear rifled through their belongings. He found very little. He placed all of his gains into a distressingly ordinary qiankun bag and resolved to gift the whole tawdry mess to the next beggar that he encountered.

He had enough food for the wargs and these people hadn’t offended Pear to the point that he felt compelled to desecrate their remains. He already had more finger bone necklaces than he could comfortably wear at one time.

Flame however, hovered over each corpse and would hold one of its hands aloft while pointing at the fingers and whining loudly.

“You want me to make you a finger bone necklace?” Pear said to Flame.

[rvm45]

Chapter Eight







After a couple of weeks of moderately hard travel, the friends arrived at the border of The Kingdom of Perpetual Snow. They were met by a platoon of nylen guards almost as soon as they entered the country.

“You are not nylen. You’re not even evil. How did you acquire the wargs?” the platoon’s lieutenant demanded.

“Show me how that it’s any of your business and I might tell you,” Pear said.

“Cripple his cultivation and bring him in for questioning,” the lieutenant ordered.

Pear shrugged as he unleashed a torrent of napalm qi at the lieutenant and his platoon. Fire was a good weapon against the cold natured nylen. Soon there was only a handful of nylen left.

Suddenly Nimbi seemed to strangle.

She spat out a garbled:

“Chut! Chut! Chut!” sound as a long stream of ropy and bloody saliva dripped unheeded from her mouth.

“Get us back across the border,” Nimbi managed to whimper in Pear’s mind.

As large as Nandi was, Pear lifted the warg’s upper quarters and dragged him back across the border. One of the remaining nylen rode his humpback horse at Pear. Even as Pear prepared to defend himself, Billy smashed both horse and rider.

Even with the nylen being dead, Billy seemed intent on stomping and goring the body into nothing but a grease stain.

Lime, who’d leapt off Billy’s back at the very first sign of hostilities, used his tail whip to slash three consecutive nylen in two.

Pear started to head back to drag Nimbi back across the seemingly significant border. Just then he saw Flame get ahold of Nimbi’s saddle with his back feet. Though Pear had never seen it, apparently the lion cub’s feet could also turn into oversized human hands.

Flame flew a few feet into the air lifting the 3200-pound Nimbi clear of the ground and then he carried her to safety.

Pear grabbed an armored nylen while he rendered several other nylen unable to stand or flee just in case he couldn’t get full satisfaction from the first interrogation client.

Pear was in no mood to shillyshally as he watched his precious friends thrash around and gasp for air like fish out of water. He stripped the nylen and then he started flaying the skin off of one lower leg and foot.

“What is wrong with Nimbi and Nandi?” Pear demanded.

The nylen screamed in agony.

“Dude, it is like: I can do anything at all to you without it even faintly pricking my conscious, just so long as I kill you when I’m done. If the full boot won’t make you talk, I’m going to take a corkscrew to one of your testicles,” Pear ground out between clenched teeth.

“Pear, we’re okay now that we’re out of the kingdom,” Nimbi’s mind voice said calmly.

Pear reached out his right hand which was at the temperature of liquid helium and froze the nylen’s head solid and then crushing the frozen head into shards.

Misery, Flame, Lime, Billy and Swipe soon made all the surviving nylen good.

“Pear, we’re the products of the Nylen Counsel. I thought that being bonded to you would negate their power over us. I was wrong. We can’t go with you. When our resistance was finally worn down, we’d attack you without warning. We used a big portion of our life-force just now, to negate the compunction to slay you,” Nimbi said.

“You’re dying!” Pear understood finally.

Pear ran and put an arm around each of the warg’s necks.

“Please don’t die! Please don’t die! I’ll feed you all the dans and elixirs that you need. I’ll find a Level-25 beast and bring you his core. I’ll do anything. I can’t bear to lose any more,” Pear railed and pleaded.

“What is that line of Yamamoto Tsunetomo that you’re always quoting? Isn’t it something about how cowards invariably theorize with the goal of surviving firmly in mind? We gave our lives freely, because we aren’t cowards. Go forward and make us proud of you,” Nandi said with his last breath.

“I love both of you,” Pear sobbed.

“We know. We loved you too,” Nimbi said in her last mind speak message.

When Nimbi and Nandi died they started to shrink and change. Eventually they became two nylen corpses.

Pear contained his astonishment and called both of the corpses into his qiankun pouch for later burial—somewhere in away from this foul cesspool—preferably beside his uncle and his parents.

Pear levitated until his feet were 4’ off the ground and walked toward the nylen capital at a pace that his remaining beasts had to strain to keep up with.

A quatrain from the Rubaiyat kept running through Pear’s mind”

“One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste.
“One moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
“The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
“Starts for the dawn of Nothing—O make haste!”

No one else dared to confront him as he marched across the snow-covered landscape in a near fugue.

************ ************** *****************

A young man riding a huge saddle bull up to the gate of the capital. The bull was a huge spirit beast with large golden horns that curled back like a bighorn ram’s horns as well as golden hooves.

There were also two three-eyed winged lions in his entourage, a gigantic black hound and a raven-sized bat.

When the guards came forward to collect the toll and extort a bit of a tip, the man presented a talisman that proclaimed that he was the designated champion of the soon-to-be-crowned queen of The Kingdom of Perpetual Snow.

“Don’t y’all usually collect a tip?” Pear asked.

“I’ll give you a tip. Seven days after the wedding tournament is concluded, I intend to raise this shit hole of a country to the ground. Ain’t gonna be one stone standing beside another. You have time to see your precious kin to safety and even transport many of your valuables if you start now. Don’t dismiss my words. Fair warning is as good as a promise,” Pear said.

Most of the guards felt taken aback by the words momentarily, but they recovered and attributed to some cheap mind technique—all except the sergeant of the guard.

Although he couldn’t tell exactly why, he felt that the words were prophetic. He left and had his family start packing that very day.

[rvm45]

Chapter Nine







The princess met Pear at the contestant’s entrance the day of the tournament.

She was all filled out now. She exuded am aura of buoyant vitality and blatant sensuality.

“Pear, you’ve come after all. You really shouldn’t have, you know…” she teased.

“So, you’ve went over to the darkside. Macht nichts. Did you know that Nandi and Nimbi were once human?”

Pear saw the puzzled look on the princess’ face.

“The wargs—I named them after you and your brother. I gave Nimbi the name you once bore. Now I’m taking it from you. If anyone calls you by her name in my presence, I’ll gut you both like fat catfish and watch you drown out of water. You don’t deserve to share a name with my Nimbi,” Pear said while tears ran down his face once more.

“You should be more respectful. You saw how easily my Uncle Crimson neutered you. A dozen Lord Crimson’s couldn’t last three seconds against me now that I’m vested,” the nylen princess said coquettishly.

Pear couldn’t help laughing for a long time. When he finally got control of himself he wiped at the tears. He placed a finger to one side of his nose and blew his nose onto the ground and repeated to the other side.

“Your Highness, I sincerely beg your pardon. First, I want to kill all your disgusting incestuous kin. Then I intend to raise your wicked kingdom to the ground. Then I will settle accounts with you—you slut!”

Pear was looking straight into her eyes with his curious golden eyes.

‘Wait a moment! Were Pear’s pupils always vertical lens-shaped slits—like a cat—or a snake?’ the princess asked herself.

“I’ll spare you until the tournament. We’ll need some comedic amusement before we start the main event,” the princess said.

“If that’s what it takes to keep your poise and air of unconcern. We both know that you are quivering in terror inside, your lowness,” Pear said.

“Don’t insult me again,” she warned.

“Or you’ll do what you wicked skank of the South? I spit on your shadow. If I wasn’t poogly about exposing myself around so many perverts and nymphomaniacs, I’d piss on your shadow,” Pear said without undue heat.

*********** ************* *********************

In the first match, Pear faced a bizarre nylen with a great hump on his back and two left arms. There was no formal introduction, but the crowd called the freak “Scat.”

He had a longsword in each of his left arms and a kite-shaped shield on his oversized right arm.

“Can you please hold up just a second. I’ll owe you a big kindness,” Pear said while holding up his hands pleadingly.

“Thank you, friend. My name is Pear of the wirehair grizzly tribe. My father was the brave warrior Cherry. My mother was the brave Goldenrod. My uncle was Brave Jared the Fool. He was a grandmaster of the sword and I attained mastery under his tutelage at the age of fourteen years old. I attained the state of grandmaster a few months later,” Pear said in a loud voice that echoed into the highest most distant seats in the amphitheater.

“To Hell with your outland family. I piss on their shadow,” a giant in the on-deck circle shouted.

Pear produced his saber. He left the buckler and the mercy dagger inside his pouch. He wanted to show the purity of his uncle’s style of swordsmanship without the hacks.

Scat was clumsy and slow by Pear’s standards. Pear deftly cut off one of his left hands and then the other.

“Pick it up with your right hand if it will ease your mind,” Pear said.

Scat wasn’t right handed. His next cut was even clumsier than his cuts with his left hands. Pear quickly chopped off the man’s last hand.

Pear quickly gathered the three hands and kept them in his bag.

Pear stepped behind his client and cut his britches off. He grabbed the man’s scrotum.

“Sorry man. I want to keep all of y’all’s scrotums to tan for keepsakes. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t maim someone and leave them alive. That would make me a bad guy like y’all. O, I almost forgot. I promised you a kindness, didn’t I? This is how I’m repaying you: I’m giving you the next few moments to get right with Jesus. You’ll be meeting him soon and he’s not at all kind to his enemies,” Pear said.

There was a long series of palsied tremors all over the man’s body unlike anything Pear had ever seen and he’d seen many men die.

“Are you ready?” Pear asked.

Scat clenched his teeth and gave a quick affirmative nod.

Pear collected his trophy and immediately struck the nylen’s head off.

The giant was well over 8’ tall and probably weighed over 500-pounds. He carried a pair of melon hammers. Pear guessed that the spherical hammerheads weighed at least 35-pounds. No normal human could have wielded such unwieldly hammers.

Since this nylen wanted to embarrass Pear by overpowering him, Pear decided not to even use his saber. He faced the giant unarmed.

The nylen swung one of his hammer overhead trusting that there was no way for Pear to block it. Pear grabbed the man’s right wrist like disarming a disobedient child. He took the melon hammer and smashed the nylen’s humorous. Then his bowie came out long enough to collect the right hand.

“I like this hammer. Reckon I’ll keep it,” Pear said.

The hammer and the giant’s right hand disappeared into Pear’s qiankun bag.

The giant smashed down on Pear a dozen times like a drummer frantically beating a tattoo. Pear knew the man was terrified. He negligently slapped aside the super-powered blows as if they’d been taps from a flyswatter. He wanted the giant to suffer some more terror.

Finally, Pear collected the nylen’s left hand and scrotum. He watched the nylen writhe in agony while he fumbled with his belt and drawstring.

“You pissed on my clan’s shadow, so I piss on your shadow,” Pear said.

Then he used the second melon hammer to smash the giant’s skull.

“My father would have massed about six times what you weigh and he was stronger pound-for-pound. I’ve had my bear ripped out of me and I’m still stronger than you,” Pear said.

Lord Crimson walked out into the white sand of the arena.

“There is no sense in letting this fool kill every one of our nobility. I’ll finish him off,” Crimson said.

“If you’re able you knob-gobbling lover of small boys and pigs,” Pear said.

Pear hit Crimson with the fiercest red fire that he commanded. He had raised his fire to 6400-degrees. That was hot enough to melt tungsten or any other earthly material. Then he fanned the flames with hurricane force winds.

Crimson simply stood there with a mocking sneer on his face.

‘This man killed Uncle Jared and Nandi the nylen. He ripped out my bear and shamed me and mocked me,’ Pear thought.

Pear hit Crimson with a lightning bolt that would have dwarfed the combined destructive power of the nine tribulation lightning strikes. Pear hit the nylen with bolt after bolt, but finally the lightning qi was exhausted.

Tears rolled down Pear’s cheeks as he sprayed Crimson with enough liquid helium to freeze the whole arena floor.

Crimson made a mocking hand clap, but he had to be chilled. Pear picked that instant to use his huge amount of earth qi to create two huge slabs of granite and to slam them together like two enormous brass cymbals.

The gigantic granite slabs broke like soda crackers crumbled over a bowl of chili.

“It ain’t over knob-gobbler! I’ve been holding something back,” Pear said with a smile.

Pear transformed into a Level-18, 6500-pound giant smoldering coal bear. He launched tons and tons of the slightly cooler orange flames at Crimson. Then Pear swung one of the enormous coal bear paws at Crimson.

Crimson blocked the blow easily. Once again, he reached inside Pear and ripped out his bear.

‘So that’s how he did that,’ Pear mused.

“I’m amazed. You found an even more formidable totem. Guess what? I’ll just neuter you again,” Crimson chuckled.

Crimson licked the glowing bear spirit just like before—well almost like before.

Notwithstanding the seriousness of the situation Pear couldn’t help bursting into laughter at the comical expression of shock and extreme disgust on Crimson’s face. Crimson spit repeatedly while he wiped his long double-forked tongue on the hand that wasn’t holding the faux bear spirit again and again—all the while trying frantically to shake the ultra-sticky fake bear spirit off his hand.

“The power of a Level-18 giant smoldering coal bear isn’t what I was holding back. That was a shameless tease,” Pear said in a voice far too deep to be human.

Pear turned into a giant—by human standards—dragon over a quarter-mile long.

“Rip this spirit out of me, if you can,” Pear roared loud enough to burst ear drums all over the capital.

Pear floated above the ground a few yards from Crimson and roared as loudly as he could over and over again. Finally, he stopped shouting at Crimson lest the sound waves kill the nylen.

A Pear avatar leaped off of the dragon. He stripped Crimson naked and bound him with chains that couldn’t have been sundered by the Fenris Wolf.

“Don’t worry,” Pear told Crimson. “You will be my honored guest for the next few days. I’ve given your people seven days grace before I start razing your nation from the face of the earth. I want to see your face when everything that you valued has been taken from you. You really should have given my family a wide berth you chicken raper. I told you that the day would come that you’d be very sorry that you left me alive,” Pear said.




As I've said, I will try to do the wrap-up chapters in the next week or two.

RVM45

[texican]

RVM,

Good to see you on PB....

Went to bed last night at 3:30 am... Made it to Chapter 7.... Finished this afternoon.

Your writing is superb....

Thank you....

Texican...

[texican]

Jan 12, 2018 20:33:45 GMT -6 rvm45 said:

Chapter Nine



As I've said, I will try to do the wrap-up chapters in the next week or two.

RVM45

RVM,

The last chapter was Jan 12, 2018....

And you noted wrap-up chapters in the next week or two....

Let see, that was approximately four weeks ago....

And the Moar Hounds are starving to find out what Pear will be doing next....

HINT....

Thanks for the story....

Texican....