Blake dragged himself through the gates of the Hunter’s Sect pavilion, hauling the fogterror’s skull behind him. It wasn’t terribly big, and he probably could’ve strapped it to his backpack, but he was too tired for that. The best he could do was drag it behind him.

  When he returned, it was late at night, and the entire pavilion was quieting down. A few hunters were returning ahead of him, arms full of furs or exotic horns or claws, and they glanced back at him suspiciously, but said nothing. One of them carried an eiknir’s antler. Hopefully, it wasn’t the same one he’d begun befriending.

  Blake’s stomach churned. Clearly, they weren’t hunting just monsters. He understood the practical side of hunting, and he didn’t want to get too upset over a dead animal, but if all they were going to do was take the pelt…

  He shut those thoughts down. He didn’t have to be here long. Just long enough to get what he needed.

  When Blake passed through the doors of the pavilion, all went quiet. Hunters’ heads turned toward him. A group of sect members sitting on the front steps of a nearby longhouse jumped up and faced him.

  “Evening,” Blake said, dipping his head to the guards as he passed through. The two guards who kept watch outside the gate sighed and grumbled, and the one who’d brought Blake through the pavilion to speak with the elder grinned. The others each tossed the guard a leather pouch filled with wooden chits.

  The guard winked at Blake. “They wagered that you wouldn't come back, much less be victorious. But it seems our junior brother has a few surprises inside him.”

  Blake pulled the skull closer. “Where do I put it?”

  “Bring it to the storehouse,” the guard said, pointing to a tall building just inside the wall. “Along with the mission slip. They’ll get you sorted out. And I’m sure Elder Ulfreld will want to show you around and bring you to your living quarters.”

  “Th—thanks,” Blake said. He hauled up the skull, then followed the directions to the storehouse. It was where everyone else was going.

  The storehouse had a high ceiling and was fatter than most of the other buildings. Runic locks adorned the doors, but the rest of the hunters dropped their wares off at an open wall. A few cultivators sat behind a counter, inspecting the pelts, and in exchange, handed over pouches of octagonal wooden chips.

  Those had to be contribution points.

  Blake approached the counter, then dropped the skull down. It was heavier than it looked, but with the help of his expanded honour sea, he hoisted it. Then he placed the mission slip down beside it.

  The cultivator at the counter was a woman at the third stage of Body Tempering, and she handled the skull with ease. “Hm…no cracks, all is present, and all’s in good order. This will fetch a good price.” She turned around and shouted, “Full points!”

  Someone tossed her a pouch from deeper within the building. She caught it and handed it to Blake. “Fifty contribution points. Good work. You’ve provided for the sect tonight.”

  “Th—thanks? Thanks.” Blake nodded and took the pouch. He stepped away from the counter, then remembered to pull Ethbin’s ring off his finger. He tucked it away in his pocket as casually as he could. Ethbin had been good about not talking, even if no one else could hear.

  As soon as Blake turned away from the counter, Elder Ulfreld marched up behind him. The man clapped a hand down on Blake’s shoulder. “Very good, Junior Brother. I take it that since you brought the skull back here, you’d like to accept our offer to join the sect.”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, Elder.”

  Ulfreld nodded. “Very well.”

  “You guys don’t happen to have showers, do you?”

  “Do you, Elder,” Ulfreld corrected. “And yes, you would be correct. We send hunters off into missions into the mists, and we would be savages if we didn’t clean ourselves up afterward. But first, let me show you your quarters.”

  Ulfreld brought Blake all around the pavilion, passing by the entrance buildings, including an armoury, a forge, a technique slate library, a regular library, and the guard house. Along the back wall of the pavilion, arranged into grids, were the hunters’ quarters.

  “Hunters, as you’ve seen, are not the only members of the sect,” Ulfreld explained. “You’ll find plenty of non-fighter cultivators among us, and a few mortals as well. The title of ‘Hunter’ refers to anyone who takes missions, though, which includes you.”

  They entered a longhouse. Blake was half expecting communal quarters—a massive hall filled with bedrolls or hammocks—but instead, they arrived in a hallway. Doors led off to the side, where individual rooms waited. Some had runic carvings on them, displaying cultivators’ names in Dynasty script.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  Ulfreld walked down the hall until he reached a door with no carvings, then snapped his fingers. A floating sword rose up beside him, and he used it to etch a carving into the wood. It scripted, Ekkson Blandi.

  Blake grimaced at the name, but at least now, he had a room of his own to speak of.

  “These will be your quarters,” Ulfreld said. “It’s not much, and usually less than what our new recruits are expecting. There’s still a chance to back out.”

  Ulfreld pushed open the door, revealing the inside of the living quarters. There was an entrance hallway, a private washroom (without a shower, but still…), a closet, and just enough room left over to host a bed.

  For Blake, it was slightly smaller than his apartment back in the city, but the amenities seemed significantly better. It had a proper window, too—nothing shattered and cracked.

  “I’m happy to stay,” he said. “Thanks.” After a few seconds, he corrected himself: “Thanks, Elder.”

  “Very well,” Ulfreld said. “Welcome to your new home. Now, let’s get you cleaned up, and we’ll see if we can’t find you a meal.”

  First, he led Blake to a longhouse adjacent to the housing hall and handed him a set of hunters’ underclothes—underclothes being what they wore beneath their armour. Blue tunics, pants, a belt, and boots.

  And best of all, it didn’t have a month’s worth of mud caked onto it.

  “This is the bathhouse,” he told Blake. “We don’t have unlimited warm water, so don’t take your time. Costs one contribution point for five minutes, two for ten.”

  Blake chuckled, then muttered, “Of course it does.”

  Ulfreld definitely heard, but he’d probably gotten tired of correcting Blake’s manners for the moment. He said, “Get yourself cleaned up, and meet me outside. I will bring you to the mess hall.”

  Blake nodded. As quickly as he could, he went to the men’s side of the bathhouse. Rows upon rows of showers lined the walls inside. He wasn’t exactly sure how it worked, considering there wasn’t any water pressure, but it had something to do with the runes carved along the edge of the faucet.

  He fed a contribution point chit into a slot beside the shower, and water began pouring. He washed off weeks of mud and dirt. His feet were in horrible shape, with all their blisters and peeling skin, and he smelled horrible. But there was some sort of scented soap mixed into the water, which helped remedy it. He couldn’t say exactly what it smelled like. Maybe incense?

  It’d take a few days to get himself truly clean, but once he was satisfied enough, he changed into his new sect clothes. His old attire was too tattered to keep, even though he had brought multiple pairs of shirts and pants. He could survive off sect clothing for the next few weeks.

  But he did keep his stolen vambraces. No one seemed to care, and evidently, the cultivator he’d killed and stolen them from didn’t belong to the Hunters’ Sect. Besides, the hunters didn’t have any standard armour, except for the shoulder pauldrons with the two red stripes. Likewise, their crest was simply an arrow inside a circle, and most of them had etched it on the fronts of their helmets.

  Being as clean as he could get himself for a single contribution point, Blake hoisted up his backpack and his staff, then strapped on his old belt overtop the new belt. It couldn’t hurt to have more belts.

  He met Ulfreld back outside, and the elder walked him across the pavilion. The mess hall wasn’t exactly central, but it was as close to central as you could get without overlapping with Ulfreld’s own quarters. The hall had a steep, thatched roof. Inside, rows of tables ran back and forth, and cultivators sat at the tables, eating from bowls, talking, and laughing.

  “This is where I will leave you for the night,” Ulfreld said. “Remember, Junior Brother: for the most part, you do not have a set schedule. How well you do in the sect will depend on how diligent you are. I have, however, requested that you train with Brother Wind-Eyes during the standard sparring session for the men of your age. You must also earn at least a hundred contribution points a month to remain in the outer court—and that’s a decree from on high. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  Blake nodded. “Thanks for the heads up.”

  “Thanks for the heads up, Elder.”

  “Uh, yes. Elder.”

  “Good. Now go eat.”

  He walked around the edge of the hall until he reached a counter. The cooks had laid out bowls full of mixed steamed barley and rice, topped with sausage and pickled vegetables. Blake took a bowl, looked around to make sure no one would protest, then sat down on the unoccupied end of a table.

  In a matter of minutes, he’d finished off the bowl, and he’d barely even registered that he’d eaten it. It was so much better than the standard travelling rations.

  He also hadn’t realized that a few other sect members had gotten closer to him. They were around his age, though all of them were at the first stage of Body Tempering, and all of them had glowing eyes. One was Blended, and he had a frog’s nostrils and frog hands.

  When Blake finally looked up and registered them, one, a boy with long black hair, said, “We weren’t expecting you to defeat the fogterror, Junior Brother. That’s a year-defining feat right there!”

  “Thanks?”

  “Thanks, Senior Brother,” another insisted, a boy with short-cropped blonde hair. “We must get him reading the Sagas, so he gets a taste for decorum. It is only proper.”

  Blake sighed, then capitulated. “Thanks, Senior Brother.”

  “How’d you do it?” the Blended boy asked. “How’d you kill the fogterror?”

  “I…” Blake tilted his head. “I mean, I could try to give you a play-by-play, but I dunno. I just hit it really hard a couple times. This is a pretty good staff.”

  The three boys looked at him like he was crazy. Finally, the first boy, the one with black hair, said, “It’s a basic staff, Junior Brother.”

  Blake glanced at it and shrugged.

  The Blended boy added, “Come to the technique library tomorrow with us, at least, Junior Brother. We will be happy to show you some techniques to use. You don’t have any Smite techniques yet, do you? And you will need an Augmentation technique to use later on, as well, even if you can’t use one right now!”

  Blake nodded hesitantly, then, after a few seconds, said, “Sure.” This was exactly why he’d come here, after all.

  But they were going to be so disappointed when he only picked out a cycling technique.