The lynx's body was beginning to cool.
Steam no longer rose from the blood pooling beneath its fur. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, stiffening. The last echoes of qi that had once pulsed through its flesh now hung in the air like the scent of scorched incense—faint, but not gone.
Li Yao crouched beside the beast and rested his fingers gently on its chest. The ribs were wide-set, bones like ironwood beneath sinew. The kill had been clean, but brutal. His own arms trembled, and now that the adrenaline was fading, pain returned to him like an old friend tapping on the shoulder.
He'd read once, on a tattered scroll half-soaked in oil, that the core of a spirit beast was like a seed of everything it had ever known. Rage. Hunger. Territory. Survival. All condensed into a pearl of refined qi, nestled deep within the beast's body, just behind the heart.
It was worth more than ten years of woodcutting wages.
If he could find it.
If he didn't destroy it in the attempt.
He pressed his fingers against the sternum, closed his eyes, and breathed deep.
Inhale. Anchor. Push. Sense.
The Stone Root Method wasn't designed for precision. It was all weight and endurance, slow cycling and brute reinforcement. But Li Yao had been refining his control bit by bit, breathing as if he were coaxing a skittish animal from its hole.
He sent a thin thread of qi from his dantian down through his arm, into his fingertips.
The feedback hit him like a shiver.
There. Just beneath the bone. A knot of condensed essence—dense and slow-spinning, like a storm trapped in amber.
He reached for it—tentatively, as if touching fire.
Then he hesitated.
What if I crack it?
What if I absorb it wrong and the beast's instincts infect mine?
He didn't know if that was even possible. Probably not. But fear had its own logic, and caution whispered from the back of his skull louder than pride.
Still, he pressed forward.
His qi wrapped carefully around the core—too thin, but present. Like lifting a stone with a spider's thread.
He coaxed it gently upward.
The qi inside the core twitched.
For a moment, he felt a pulse of something alien—wild. Something that remembered claws and cold nights, and blood hot in its throat.
Then the connection snapped.
A faint pop, barely audible.
And there it was, rising slowly through the torn sinew: a small, cloudy pearl, no bigger than a bean, glimmering with threads of violet light.
He caught it in both hands.
It was warm. And it throbbed faintly, like a second heartbeat.
He didn't speak. Didn't cheer. Just stared.
This shouldn't be mine.
This is what disciples harvest after years in sects.
I'm just… a boy with cracked knuckles and calloused feet.
And yet—here it was. Real.
The core of a spirit beast, cradled in the palms of a rootless woodcutter.
He wrapped it in the cleanest cloth he had, then turned back to the lynx's body.
There was more to take, if he dared.
The claws—razor-sharp and slightly curved—could be cleaned and turned into tools or traded to a wandering alchemist. The blood, if gathered soon, could be simmered into bone-boiling tonic. The hide was damaged, but parts of it might still be salvageable.
He hesitated.
Stripping the beast felt… strange. Like robbing a corpse of something more than flesh. It had fought him with everything it had. And in some awful way, he respected it for that.
But survival had never made room for sentiment.
Li Yao's breath came out in a long, quiet sigh.
"I'll use every piece," he whispered. "I'll make it count."
His hands moved steadily, if clumsily. He had no knives meant for this, just a short gutting blade and a cord of hemp rope. Still, the work grounded him. The repetition dulled the edge of his thoughts.
By the time he rose, the sun was dying behind the trees. Redlight turned the forest into a bleeding dream. The corpse was lighter now, folded into wrappings and tied to a sled of rough-cut branches he'd bound together from saplings.
He stood for a while, just breathing.
Sweat on his brow. Blood dried on his knuckles. Beast core hidden in his shirt.
And a new, quiet truth in his chest:
I'm not weak anymore. I'm still nothing—but I'm not helpless.
He didn't know what would come next.
But as he turned down the trail toward Green Pine Village, dragging the sled behind him, he did know this:
Tonight, he would sleep a little closer to the man he wanted to become.