The snow on the road was thin enough that Jiang barely noticed it. His boots crunched through the crust without effort, his breath even, his stride steady. Beside him, the desperate villager sounded like he was on the verge of collapsing, each inhale coming out as a ragged gasp.

  “Please, Honoured Cultivator,” the man panted finally, “I… I’ve been running since dawn. I know I’m only slowing you down – perhaps I could simply give you directions to Shanmei?”

  Jiang forced himself to ease his pace, even though his body insisted he didn’t need to. That was another annoying thing about cultivation – it made it far too easy to forget what normal people were capable of. “Fine,” he said, mustering what patience he could. “And while you’re at it, tell me everything you know about this spirit beast. Start with when it showed up.”

  He hesitated. “And, before I forget, what is your name?”

  “This one is called Jin Rou, Honoured Cultivator,” the man said with a bow that almost turned into a stumble. “It… it first appeared three nights ago, sir,” Jin Rou said, his voice shaky as he tried to catch his breath. “Just came out of the Blackpine Forest, like the woods themselves had birthed it. At first, we thought it was just a normal bear, a big one, maybe driven mad by the winter. But then… then it walked right through Old Man Chen’s stone fence like it was paper, sir. Didn’t even slow down.”

  He shuddered, his gaze distant. “It’s huge. Taller than a man on horseback, and… it’s made of stone. Or, at least, it covers itself in stone. When we shot at it, the arrows just… broke. Bounced right off. Luan, one of our best guards, got too close with a spear. The beast didn’t even try to bite him. It just swiped, and… Luan was gone.”

  Jiang nodded, hiding a scowl. Slow was good, but the fact that the beast could cover itself in stone was… slightly worrying. He was stronger than mortals, sure, but not strong enough to punch through stone.

  “So it’s armoured,” Jiang said, falling into the old, familiar rhythm of questions. Back in Liǔxī he’d had to hunt down a few predators that occasionally sniffed around the livestock. Hardly on the level of spirit beasts, of course, but the theory was the same. “Are there any gaps in the coverage?”

  “Not as far as we can tell, Honoured Cultivator. Its hide looks like… like rock. When it moves, you can hear it grinding. And it’s slow, clumsy. It doesn’t seem to hunt like a normal predator; it just plods. That’s the only reason we were able to get the gates shut. It’s been circling the village ever since. We can hear it, scraping against the palisade. The sound is… terrible.”

  “Has it tried to break in?”

  “Not yet,” Jin Rou said, his voice tight with fear. “It… it found the livestock we couldn’t get inside in time. The cows, some of the goats. It’s been content to eat those. But... there aren’t many left. And our walls are just wood, sir. Sturdy, but… it’s so heavy. We can feel the ground shake when it walks. We don’t think they’ll hold, not if it really tries. And our winter crop is still in the fields. If we can’t harvest... we’ll starve before the spring thaw. We’re trapped.”

  They walked in silence for a few moments. The road wound between low, frost-hardened fields and patches of scrubby woodland.

  “You said it’s slow,” Jiang said. “Does it have any other attacks? Can it throw rocks or control them in any way?”

  “No, sir. Nothing like that,” Jin Rou said, rubbing his raw hands together. “It just… hits things. It swiped at the main gate this morning, and the wood splintered. It’s just... strong. And it’s covered in that rock armour. We’ve tried everything. Spears, arrows, even pouring some pitch on it and lighting it on fire. That one made it back off for a little while, and it seemed a little wary, but the fire didn’t even leave a mark. It’s like trying to fight a walking mountain.”

  Jiang raised an eyebrow. That was pretty creative, not to mention brave, to try lighting a spirit beast on fire. Clearly, this village wasn’t made up of cowards. Unfortunately, it also meant they’d already tried everything he could think of. His own sword would be useless against stone, and his dagger even more so.

  His bow… he thought of the cheap wooden bows he’d been breaking one after another, and the arrows he’d bought in the last town. Even with his enhanced strength, an arrow would shatter before it even scratched that hide. He couldn’t just shoot it.

  For a moment, he idly wondered if he could attach his shadows to the tip of an arrow, make it sharper or something. Unfortunately, the way his shadows got weaker the further away they were from him meant the idea wouldn’t work. Even being attached to a physical object likely wouldn’t be enough to compensate.

  So, it had to be the weak spots. Eyes. Inside the mouth. Maybe the joints, if the armour was thinner there.

  “Alright,” Jiang said, his voice cutting through Jin Rou’s nervous silence. “Stop here. Catch your breath. Then point me toward Shanmei. The sooner I get this done, the sooner we can all get on with our lives.”

  Jin Rou looked at him, his eyes wide with a desperate, pathetic hope that made Jiang’s stomach twist.

  “You… you’ll kill it? Just like that? By yourself?”

  “That’s the plan,” Jiang said, aiming for a confident tone. This was probably the point that sect cultivators would make some kind of grand proclamation, but he couldn’t really think of anything. At least this was something he didn’t have to feel confused about.

  This wasn’t Gao Leng with his twisted Qi and human resources. It wasn’t Sect politics or Elders playing games with other people’s lives. It was a beast that needed killing. No moral knots to untangle. No question of whether it “deserved” to die. It was a threat to a village’s crops and children. That was enough.

  He still resented the timing. Every step north that wasn’t toward Birigawa felt like sand slipping through his fingers. Every detour, every “necessary obligation” made it harder not to wonder if he’d made a mistake agreeing to the Sect’s terms in the first place. Yes, Li Xuan and Mistress Bai were useful. Yes, their training was turning him into something that could actually stand in front of Gao Leng without being immediately turned into paste.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  But useful didn’t mean good. Helpful didn’t mean kind. And every new responsibility piled onto his shoulders made the path to his actual goal feel further away.

  If I ignore this and the beast kills half the village, he thought, I’ll hear about it eventually. Someone in a tavern, some rumour on a road. And I’ll know it was because I walked past.

  He wasn’t willing to carry that burden.

  — — —

  Jiang reached Shanmei before noon—alone, as expected. Jin Rou’s directions had been clear enough, and once Jiang had confirmed the layout of the land, the villager had been left behind with nothing more than a “catch up when you can.” There was no point dragging a wheezing mortal behind him while a spirit beast was chewing its way through an entire winter’s worth of livestock.

  The fields around the village stretched wide and open, the snow trampled in some places, untouched in others. Shanmei itself sat behind a rough palisade, sturdier than what he’d expect from anything short of a town, but still very much a rough construction – wooden stakes, lashed crossbeams, the occasional lookout platform that was more a polite suggestion of height than a defensive structure. Still, the presence of the wall and the tactics Jin Rou had spoken of suggested that someone here had probably been a soldier at some point.

  Jiang had been a little worried he was going to have to track down the spirit beast himself – not that he thought it would be terribly difficult, just time-consuming – but fortunately, that wasn’t going to be a problem.

  After all, the bear was impossible to miss.

  A hulking mass of stone and muscle sat in the middle of a frost-bitten field, crouched over what had once been a cow. The carcass was torn messily open, steaming in the cold air, ribs cracked wide like a butcher’s display. Even from this distance, Jiang could make out the scattered bones and dark patches half-buried in the snow—more livestock, picked clean. A dozen at least. Maybe more.

  That alone should have been impossible. No normal creature could eat that much in three days. Even an ordinary bear would’ve gorged itself sick, then slept for a week. But this thing kept eating.

  It lifted its head the moment Jiang stepped into open ground. Thick plates of stone clung to its hide, some smooth as river rock, others jagged like shards of a shattered cliff. As the beast squared itself toward him, Jiang saw fresh stone flowing upward from the ground – thin lines of grit and dust at first, then a full sheet sliding over its shoulders, sealing cracks and hiding any sign that this was a living, breathing creature.

  It was… unpleasantly impressive.

  Jiang drew a slow breath and opened his Qi senses. The beast’s presence pulsed faintly in the air, thick and rough-edged, like coarse sandpaper dragged through water. It didn’t have the distinct structure of a human cultivator – no sharp steps, no neatly defined stage – but it was somewhere around the fifth stage. Maybe sixth. Strong, but diffuse. Less focused.

  Which meant, in theory, he was stronger.

  The bear didn’t seem to care.

  It rose to its full height, stone plates grinding against one another, and began lumbering toward him. Each step made the frozen ground tremble. The remaining livestock pressed themselves against the far fence in a pathetic attempt to get further away.

  “Well,” Jiang muttered, reaching for his bow, “let’s get the obvious failures out of the way.”

  He drew an arrow, nocked it, and loosed in the span of a breath. The arrow whistled cleanly through the air – good speed, clean line, a solid shot. Something he would have been proud of before becoming a cultivator. It struck the stone plating on the bear’s brow with a sharp crack.

  The arrow snapped in half without slowing the creature in the slightest.

  Not unexpected. He drew another, shifted his aim, and fired again, this time at a slight angle in hopes of catching the curve of the skull, or at least test whether the creature would react.

  It didn’t even twitch. It simply lumbered on, picking up its pace.

  So much for arrows.

  Jiang slung the bow over his shoulder and drew his sword. The sun caught faintly along its edge – the only weapon he owned that had actually been made with cultivators in mind. If anything could carve through stone, it should be this. Li Xuan had declared it as ‘passable’, but Jiang got the impression the senior disciple’s standards were higher than most.

  The bear was still slow, trudging steadily toward him. The ground shook with every step, and yet Jiang couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Jin Rou had said it only moved at this speed. That its lumbering pace was what kept Shanmei alive.

  And yet, his instincts were buzzing at him. Then he felt it – a sudden surge of Qi, blunt and heavy but violent in its raw force.

  “Oh, you bastard—”

  The beast launched itself.

  The stone beneath its legs cracked outward in a spiderweb as its entire enormous bulk shot forward like a fired boulder. Jiang didn’t stop to think; he threw himself sideways, pushing Qi into his legs purely on instinct. His leap carried him five, maybe six meters across the snow, landing in a skid that kicked up a spray of powder.

  The bear roared past him, stone armour cracking unpleasantly as its arm scraped the ground during its uncontrolled charge. The beast ploughed through a wooden fence and skidded to a halt only after tearing up a long, ragged trench.

  It couldn’t turn mid-charge. Good. A weakness.

  Jiang sprinted forward before it could fully pivot, circling behind the creature. As he did so he noticed that the armour at the back of the beast was cracked and missing in some places – at a guess, it had somehow used portions of its armour to launch itself at those speeds. Good news, that; it meant that the beast was unlikely to display similar speed in its regular movements.

  Jiang raised his sword and brought it down on the back leg with all the strength he could muster. The blade bit into the stone, which was good news, but only enough to leave a gouge with the width of two fingers, which was bad news. Stone flakes scattered across the snow, and a ripple passed through the plating of the bear’s hide. The armour he had cut tightened, smoothed, then bulged outward in a sudden spike the length of his forearm, stabbing toward his chest.

  Jiang back-stepped hard, nearly stumbling in his haste. The spike shot past, missing him by a handspan. Another plate of stone shifted along the beast’s flank, like a living shield trying to angle itself toward him.

  So. The beast had free-form control over the stone. Great. Not entirely unexpected, though, and from the start he’d planned on having to target weak spots. He retreated several meters just in case the beast had another trick up its stone sleeves and gave himself a chance to catch his breath. This was likely going to become something of an endurance fight.

  The beast finished turning toward him, hoisting itself back to its full height. Snow slid off its stony hide. He started looking for the eyes to mark the openings around the muzzle, the thin patches beneath the jaw, the soft tissue around the ears. But when the beast faced him fully, the thought died unspoken.

  Its head was a solid stone sphere.

  No eyes. No nostrils. No mouth. Just smooth rock from crown to jawline, unmarred by even the suggestion of a gap, vaguely in the shape of a bear’s head. He’d seen its eyes before, though, when it had launched itself at him – which meant the thing was smart enough to know its weaknesses and cover for them.

  Jiang’s grip tightened on his sword, and for the first time a sliver of unease crawled down his spine.

  “Well,” he said under his breath, “that’s… a problem.”