While I worked several of the disciples brought me the corpses of the hyenas they killed and I paid them one stone for a level one or ten stones for a level two corpse, half a month’s salary if you were the same level as the dead hyena. This allowed me to stockpile bodies without having to take my concentration away from the talismans.

  After the first two hundred metal talismans I started making metal defensive talismans. I would try to make thirty or forty of them to pass out to the people, as they proved so useful in the last engagement. Taking around thirty seconds each to make, I was finished just over twenty minutes later. I would love to make more Stone Spike talismans, as mine had proved so useful, but I didn’t have an Earth root like Randy, nor did I know how to do the technique to begin with. Now that I thought about it, though, I seemed to remember Randy having a metal and water root, not an Earth root, so he likely paid or convinced one of the other elders to make them for him. Either that or he had used the False Roots technique to get an Earth root. I would have to ask him.

  Without a better idea what would be needed, I started making tribulation calling talismans. These took at least a minute to make, but when Chu Van told us an hour later that we would be setting out for the lion cave in half an hour, I finished the fifty third talisman, stored it, then took a brain pill for the mental fatigue and started recovering my qi as quickly as possible.

  In this place I could gather qi about as fast as in my quarters at the Ji family estate, but not as fast as I could at the sect. Still, I was forced to limit my gathering rate to just below the rate at which tribulation lightning would start to form, as I didn’t want to reveal the fact that I could use it as a cultivation resource.

  When Chu called for us to set out I had completely refilled the dantian in my body and mostly refilled my soul sea, the sea now having a qi quantity on par with an early level three cultivator. I gave five attack talismans to each of the thirty one disciples left, and twenty to Shu Gongzhu as she couldn’t fight with a weapon, keeping twenty five for myself. This would allow us to quickly weaken them at the start of combat. I also gave a metal defensive talisman to everyone, so that they could protect themselves against the lions.

  Chu lead us back to the site of our last engagement and ordered everyone to prepare for attack. I had everyone pull out the talismans so that they could throw them when ordered to. I doubted any of them could properly target multiple lions at once, but they should all be able to use one at a time. I walked over to Chu. “We should try the peaceful option if it’s possible.” I said, and he gave me a confused look.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean, you might not have to fight them. If they were still level two, we wouldn’t have an option, but as some of them are at level three, we might be able to negotiate.”

  “Negotiate? They killed two of our people.”

  “And we killed one of theirs. A level three. They lost more than we did, so they might be willing to negotiate.”

  “But we’re stronger than them. We can defeat them if they turn violent.” he said.

  “Exactly, we don’t need to fear them. If they attack us we can defeat them, but we will lose more people if we do. I’m supposed to protect the people here, and I think this is the best way to do that. Besides, look at it from the lion’s perspective. What would you do if people came to attack your city to kidnap your people and steal your children? You would see them as bandits at best. Wouldn’t you want to fight harder?” Chu nodded. “Now, what if the people instead asked to recruit the poor, or take in the orphans and the infirm? How many people would bother fighting them? Some may even help them.”

  “The young and infirm? Refugees? Wouldn’t we be getting the worst quality lions in the deal, outside of the young, which will be average?”

  “Except you are forgetting that we have medicine. Which means that we might be able to heal all of them, and even if we can’t we can probably fix many of the issues. A lion with a missing foot is still useful to us as long as he can move around and keep the prey animals in their cages.”

  He nodded and thought for a few minutes. “Very well. I will offer to take away the unwanted ones. They might still decide to attack, so be on guard, but if I can, I’ll do it your way.”

  When we were ready Chu whistled to get the lion’s attention and several of them looked our way, though none approached us. I considered launching a talisman near them to anger them and trick them into attacking, but they were a kilometer away, too far for my talisman to travel and still have a good chance of hitting where I wanted it to. Besides, an actual attack would likely ruin our chances of negotiating with them.

  We stood there for a few minutes, then a group of over a dozen lions exited the cave, including eight level three and five peak level two lions. They looked at us again, then there was a streak of light and the group jumped in front of us. ‘You returned. Do you seek your death, or ours?’

  Chu took a deep breath, nervous about his negotiation. ‘Actually, neither. What happened earlier was a misunderstanding.’ he said, and the lion gave him a confused look. ‘We came to trade with you, and the female on guard thought we were attacking.’

  This seemed to confuse the lion even more. ‘Trade? I don’t know this idea.’

  Now it was Chu’s time to be confused. Trade was something he had been around since birth, so he found it hard to believe that anyone wouldn’t know what that was. Though, because they had grown up as animals, that somewhat made sense. ‘Uh, trade is...well, we give you things you want and in exchange you give us things we want.’

  ‘You wish to give us tribute, but want us to give tribute as well?’ The confused lion asked. ‘How can we both be subordinate to the other?’

  ‘No, not tribute. Trade. Trade means that we see each other as equals, or at least equal enough that we won’t try and kill each other to get what the other is offering.’

  ‘I think I understand’, said an older male, early level three. ‘When the Hyenas wanted the fruit from the rainbow tree, they gave us three deer they had caught. We like deer better than fruit, so the chief allowed them to eat our fruit because they gave us the deer to keep us from needing to eat them.’

  Chu nodded. ‘Yes, exactly. You traded your fruit for three deer. Both of you got a food you wanted and got rid of a food you didn’t want.’

  The female nodded slightly in acknowledgment. ‘I don’t remember that, as I was still a child then. But why would the hyenas not want to eat deer? They are predators, if not as good as us.’

  ‘They likely ate too many deer and got tired of the taste.’ Chu responded and she nodded.

  ‘Then what are you offering, and what do you want?’

  Chu paused and sent me a message. ‘I forgot to decide what we could offer them. Medicine maybe?’

  I shrugged and walked forward. ‘We offer the hyena pack.’ I said, and dropped all of the bodies on the ground. ‘I want to keep their hides and blood, but you can have everything else.’

  The female lion looked surprised, then laughed a little. ‘So you killed those scheming cowards? Good. Did they attack you?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, but we killed most of them. They weren’t very smart.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, they thought they were, because they like to make plans. But even that rat over there is better than them at plans. We would have fought them ourselves, but their land is too far away.’ she chuckled. ‘Very well, we will take the dead hyenas once you take the hides and blood. What do you want us to give in return? We don’t have any more of the fruit. The tree isn’t ready yet.’

  Chu hesitated, then said ‘We want to bring some of your people with us.’

  She suddenly looked like she wanted to bite us. ‘You think we would give you our people to eat?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘No, not food. My tribe is made up of many humans like me as well many spirit beasts. We team up with them, become their friends. That way, when we fight other tribes we can use our strengths to protect each other, and stop the enemy from using the other’s weakness. We know your people are weak to metal, and we can protect your people from it while they protect us from enemies we are weak to.’

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She looked confused. ‘Metal?’ she asked.

  ‘This.’ I said, and put some metal qi in my hand. ‘Or this.’ I said, pulling my sword from storage.

  The lioness stepped back. ‘Those are poison to us. Take them away.’

  I nodded and restored my sword and reabsorbed the qi.

  Chu spoke up again. ‘And we wouldn’t need your warriors. The rats had more people than they could feed, so we took the extra rats with us. We could do the same for you. Or, if some of you are sick or injured and you don’t think they will recover, that’s fine too. We’ll even take those that you don’t want to be part of your tribe, but still are.’

  The lioness thought for a minute, then nodded. ‘I will speak with the chief about this. If he wants to give up some of our people, I will bring them here.’ Chu nodded and she streaked away, arriving at the cave within a few seconds. She went inside and about ten minutes later left the cave with several other lions in front of her, carrying a cub in her mouth. They tried to run towards us, but several of them could barely manage to light jump, and even then they only managed a few meters at a time.

  After around five minutes she reached us, and walked over to Chu. ‘This is the cub of the one your people killed. You can raise her, as she has no mother to do so. The others were injured fighting you or other groups, and one has a coughing sickness.’

  ‘You can’t find the child a replacement mother?’ Chu asked.

  ‘No lioness is willing to nurse another’s child, even if she took the other’s mate. So the child will die if you don’t want it.’ Chu shrugged and reached to grab it, and she opened her mouth to let him do so.

  He then looked at me. “You said you might want a cat, so here,” he said, handing me the cat. It was solid yellow, except for the white streaks, and slightly larger than a house cat.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I did say that, but I wasn’t thinking ‘lion’ when I said so. Still, I’ll keep her. I’m sure I can find someone that wants a lion.” I held it in my arms and tried to feed it a dried fish from my field rations. For some reason the local people like to put dried peppers on tiny fish, then sun dry them. I didn’t like the flavor, but I brought them anyway so that I could have more variety in my rations. The cat, however, didn’t seem to mind it and ate several.

  Chu nodded his head. ‘We accept your trade. Please allow us to remove the hides and blood of the hyenas, and you can take the rest.’

  As the hyenas were only about the size of large dogs the disciples could lift them up and hold them without getting exhausted. We had a limited number of jars, so I started having disciples hold up the hides as well before painting them with the blood of the full jars and using the technique to infuse the blood into them.

  The lions thought we were weird for doing so, but about every fifteen minutes I infused all of the qi into one of the hides, and would finish it when we had some time. After a bit of rearranging, I ended up storing the level one and two blood directly in my storage bag due to lack of space, mixing them out of necessity, then filling the jars we had with the level three blood, labeled for the creature it came out of.

  When the lion cub went to sleep I gave one of the disciples the bird in my bag so that they could hold onto it for me, then put the lion cub in there. I didn’t want to risk the lion cub waking up and deciding to attack the lightning sparrow, even if the bag was supposed to keep the beasts asleep, as that didn’t always work.

  The lions carried the food back to their cave and told us to leave, so we took the injured and sick lions and moved a kilometer away. This group didn’t have a level three member, so they couldn’t speak, but they were smart enough to know that we were their new tribe and that they needed to obey us. Once we moved far enough away I pulled out my level one kit and started diagnosing and treating them as best I could. The new lions looked a bit weak, likely because many of them hadn’t eaten recently, so Shingua once again fixed some food, this time the Lightning Sparrow, because she didn’t want to feed the lions their kin. When the soup was finished, the meat having been broken up for easier digestion, she gave it to the lions. She gave me a little bit for the cub to try, and I woke it up long enough for it to eat what was on the plate and go back to sleep.

  I gave Birdy another piece of Lion meat and realized that it was much stronger than before. While its cultivation hadn’t increase by much, its body was far more refined than I thought it would be. I guessed that the abundance of qi in the food, and maybe the traits of the animal that the meat it ate came from, were helping the little sparrow refine its body. “How about I give you a name?” I said. “Maybe maque-er? Xiao Maque? Maybe it would be better the other way around. Xiao of the Maque clan? Maque Xiao?” Little Sparrow, with Sparrow being its family name wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t think of a better one at the moment.

  While the cat and Xiao slept or cultivated, I took out the mostly finished leather and finished the procedure, though I didn’t yet cut out the talisman papers. I could do so once I needed them or we were in a safer locations, possibly after leaving the hidden realm.

  We had been going for eighteen hours so far, so Chu said that we should take a break, letting those that needed to sleep. After that, I carefully gathered enough qi to advance all of my meridians to the edge of level three. While the limit on my Soul Sea and true meridians was far enough away that I wouldn’t be able to approach it with my current seed, I was able to advance the blood and nerve false meridians enough that tiny droplets of almost pure qi formed in my blood and spinal fluid. At first, there was considerable pain from advancing to this point, as the cells around the drops couldn’t handle it and were essentially poisoned to death, but I swallowed a level one blood and a level one nerve pill, and the pain quickly subsided.

  I was now at what this world considered to be peak level two, though on Earth this would be called initial level three. The difference was that on Ilarya one wasn’t considered level three until their first Rebirth was complete, but on Earth you were considered Foundation realm as soon as you had organic PLQ within your meridians and could survive it long term.

  With the last fifteen minutes of our down time I reinforced the blood and nerve seeds and fed a bit of qi into my soul sea seed, so that I would be able to hold a bit more qi for my rebirth. Two hours after our break began Chu woke everyone up and ordered us to pack up.

  “We have eighteen hours left, and the center of the realm is about two hundred li away, about the distance we already traveled, so we will need to hurry. I want to make it there early, then we can scavenge the area around the gateway until it is time to leave.”

  We set off in the general direction we were already going in. ‘How do you know which direction we need to go?’ I mentally asked Chu, and received the mental equivalent of a smile, or what would be a laughing emoji on Earth.

  ‘Sense the flow of qi in the air.’ he responded. ‘It is going in the same direction as us because the gate formation is drawing it in so that it can form a gate back home. The qi is also getting more dense as we advance, which is why the plants and beasts are higher level.’

  Now that I thought about it, the lions were higher level than the rats, as were the hyenas and lightning sparrows, though the hyenas weren’t as high level as the lions. I was also seeing many level two insects around us, whereas the one I fed Xiao was the only one near where we started. That meant that the levels were slowly increasing.

  Six hours later we reentered the forest, and Chu and I had the disciples keep an eye out for hostile animals. I had Xiao do a bit of scouting as well, just in case there were predators around, but other than a kingdom of spirit squirrels and a city of three types of spirit monkeys that was having some sort of race riots, both of which we avoided, there weren’t any hostile creatures in the area. Even if I had enough time, I didn’t want to get in the middle of the ruling class stone monkeys and the downtrodden Capuchin with superior numbers. Too much civil unrest made trade difficult and dangerous.

  Two hours after we entered the forest we came to a clearing. Up ahead was a spirit water pond with a small island in the middle of it, the pond surrounded by bushes of various spirit plants. There seemed to be a large creature wrapped around the tree, but I couldn’t tell exactly what it was from this distance with just a glance.

  Chu signaled me telepathically and pointed to a group of berry bushes nearby and I noticed orange cloth poking out of one of them. While we left the other disciples in the edge of the woods, Chu and I snuck over to the group of bushes. There seventeen monks, many of them wounded, hid from the creature in the middle of the pond.

  ‘Amhitabha, monk Mishana’. I said to the lead monk. ‘If you require medical assistance, I can help.’ I pulled out my level two medical kit, and started bandaging wounds.

  ‘Amitabha, and much thanks, kind benefactor Li Kev.’ He raised his hand it blessing. ‘We tried to help a group of spirit animals nearby, teaching them Buddhism, but they turned to violence instead of peace. The physician of our group fell at the hands of their leaders.’

  ‘The monkeys?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘I saw that they were fighting over race issues, but didn’t approach. It seemed that the bottom class was leading an uprising.’

  He nodded. ‘The Capuchin were most receptive to our teachings, but the stone monkeys didn’t like it. They taught Confucianism to the others, and saw what we were doing as an attack on their society’s principles. When they tried to arrest us, the Capuchin attacked them to defend us, and asked us to flee. The seventeen who are here are the only ones to escape and live. I don’t know if the others survived.’

  I nodded. ‘You could return to see, but then you might miss the opportunity to return home.’

  Mishana nodded. ‘I have no choice but to trust them to the Buddha’s care and continue towards the gate.’

  I nodded. ‘I assume that there is something here that you want to return with? Otherwise you would leave the clearing.’

  Mishana nodded. ‘The tree in the center of the island is a rainbow enlightenment tree. Eating the fruits it produces not only helps raise your cultivation, but they help refine the mind and can grant bursts of inspiration. The tree carries sixty seven fruit, enough for each of us monks to have three, though as you are now here, we will only take one each if you help us.’

  I nodded. ‘I assume the creature that is wrapped around the tree is the problem?’ Mishana nodded. ‘Any idea what it is?’

  Mishana nodded his head. ‘Flood dragon.’ he said, and Chu suddenly looked worried. I, however, looked confused.

  ‘Snake with a dragon legendary bloodline.’ Chu told me. ‘Most likely a water snake. Sometimes two bloodlines compliment each other well enough that they can merge inside a creature to create traits that use both bloodlines. One of the most common ones to do that are a water snake’s water root and a dragon’s power and sometimes breath attack. This is called a flood dragon.’

  For some reason I thought of Xiao, and how its abilities weren’t exactly like the others of its race. Could it also have a special bloodline? ‘Then it is much more dangerous than a normal water snake. Any idea what level it is?’

  Mishana nodded. ‘Level three peak.’