Cain found out the next morning.
He hadn't been at the entrance hall when the warriors returned. He had been sulking in the training grounds since dawn, as he did every time an expedition left without him, and by the time the news reached him, the funerals were already being prepared.
So he heard it secondhand, from one of the younger boys who had been watching from the rocks.
Big Brother Ashen went with them.
Cain went straight to their father.
Ashen happened to be there, sitting across from Adam in the patriarch's study with a cup of tea between his hands, discussing the burial arrangements. The door banged open, and Cain stood in the doorway with his face flushed red.
"Is it true?"
Adam looked up calmly. "Is what true?"
"That he went up there!" Cain jabbed a finger at Ashen. "On an expedition! At fifteen!"
"Yes."
"How is that fair?!"
Cain stormed into the room, shaking with anger.
"We made a bet, Father! You made it! The one who brings the best offering to the tribe marries Lapis. And now you're taking him up there, where all the beasts, mines, and treasures are, while I'm stuck down here killing shackled Narkals? How am I supposed to compete with that?"
Adam opened his mouth, but instinctively knew that no matter what he said, it would only make things worse, so he silently closed it.
The truth was that the bet had never once crossed his mind. When he had agreed to let Ashen join the warriors, he had been thinking about one thing: how to make his son strong enough to survive up there and how to turn him into a man who could protect the tribe after Adam was gone.
The bet was the last thing on his mind.
But looking at it from Cain's side… the boy wasn't wrong, nor was it fair to him.
Still, Adam wasn't about to take Ashen off the expeditions over it. Not after what he had seen his son do in that cave, or in the ruins. The boy had turned out to be far more useful than Adam had ever bargained for.
So the patriarch said nothing, and the silence stretched.
He glanced at Ashen.
Ashen set his teacup down and shrugged.
"It's fine. Whatever I find on expeditions, I won't use any of it for the offering."
Cain froze. "...What?"
Ashen looked at his brother. "I said… anything I gain up there stays out of the bet. When the time comes, I'll offer something from down here; same ground as you." Ashen picked his teacup back up and took a sip. "Fair?"
Cain stared at him for a long time, searching both their faces. What he saw only made his already foul mood turn even fouler.
He was not, in fact, finding this fair. Nothing that came out of Ashen's mouth would ever be considered fair in Cain's mind.
Even thinking about it without prejudice, this arrangement would still allow Ashen to gain more experience and increase his chances of making a better offering.
But he wasn't the kid Cain anymore. Now he could observe and gauge the mood. And from what he had seen in his father's expressions, getting anything more than this was impossible, no matter what.
'Fuck… fuck… FUCK…' Cain glared at the bastard with resentment. 'What did you do to make Father favor you so heavily? Why is it always you? God FUCKING damn it!!!'
"..."
"..."
"...Fine," he said finally, through gritted teeth. "Fine. But I'm holding you to that."
He turned and left without another word, though he made sure to slam the door on his way out.
Adam let out a long breath and rubbed his temples.
"You didn't have to do that."
"I know." Ashen sipped his tea. "But it was making your head hurt. I could tell."
Adam looked at his son for a moment, then shook his head with a tired smile.
"...Thank you."
◉◉◉
Cain did give up, in the sense that he never brought up the expeditions again.
But from that day on, his jealousy changed shape.
The loud tantrums and childish tackles stopped. What replaced them was quieter, more patient, and far more irritating.
"He told the little ones that you only survive up there because Father protects you," Lapis reported one evening, sitting cross-legged on the bed while Ashen sharpened a spear. "Apparently, you hide behind the carriages the whole time."
"Oho? He did? Did the little ones believe him?"
"Half of them were nodding along, so there's that. The other half kept asking why you have more scars than he does." Lapis giggled, "You should've seen his face then."
Ashen snorted.
A few weeks later, it was something else.
"Monica says someone moved the stream channel near your tree," Lapis said. "Just a little, but the water stopped reaching the roots."
"I noticed," Ashen said mildly. "I moved it back."
"It was him."
"I know."
Lapis looked at him for a long moment. "Do you want me to handle it?"
"No."
"I could handle it quietly."
"No, Lapis."
She huffed and flopped back onto the bed. "You're too soft on that brat."
"He's growing up. That's all." Ashen ran the whetstone along the spear's edge. "He used to throw rocks at the front door. Now he's learning to pick locks. It's progress, in its own way."
Lapis didn't answer. But her hand had drifted to rest on the sheathed training katana beside her, and her fingers were drumming on its scabbard.
Ashen noticed, but said nothing.
Lately, she had told him, the blade felt restless whenever Cain lingered near their room. As though The House's Blade had started counting him among the threats to her house.
That worried him far more than anything Cain had done so far.
◉◉◉
The expeditions became a part of Ashen's life.
Every month or two, the warriors would climb to the surface and disappear into the black world above, and Ashen would go with them. They would hunt, scout, fight, gather. Sometimes they came back in two weeks, sometimes in two months, and sometimes… they came back with fewer than they left with.
Every time, Ashen came back with his body stronger than before.
That was the work of the two Path Skills he had gained with his Fifth Step epithet.
Body Refiner.
==============================
Sown Strain
During exertion, you may gather the strain your body suffers and sow it within your flesh as dormant seeds, instead of letting it hinder you.
Fatigue, torn muscle, bruised bone, and overtaxed circuits may all be sown.
Sown strain no longer slows your movements, though its weight is never forgotten.
Each seed carries the imprint of the hardship that created it. Wounds that would prove fatal cannot be sown. Sown strain must eventually be tended.
If left unharvested for too long, the seeds sour and return as exhaustion far heavier than what was sown.
==============================
Fallow Rest
When you rest, your body lies fallow.
While asleep or wholly at rest, the seeds sown within your flesh germinate.
Muscle, bone, sinew, and circuit refine themselves according to the hardships imprinted upon them, adapting your body to endure what once strained it.The deeper and more undisturbed your rest, the greater the refinement.
The more seeds sown, the longer the rest required. Waking before the harvest is complete halts the process and leaves the remaining strain to be felt in full.
==============================
The first time he used them properly was on his second expedition.
They were three days into a forced march through ash and corruption, carrying the carcass of a stone-backed boar between six of them, and Ashen's legs had begun to scream from the first day. His shoulders burned. His lungs ached with every step.
So he sowed it.
He gathered the ache in his thighs and pressed it down into his flesh like a farmer pushing a seed into soil. The burning faded. His legs felt light again, though somewhere deep inside them, he could feel something small waiting.
He did the same with his shoulders. Then the stitch in his side. Then the strain in his circuits after an ambush, and the bruised ribs from a beast's tail.
By the time they returned home, he was carrying dozens of seeds.
And the moment he lay down in his own bed, the harvest began.
He slept for two days straight.
Lapis nearly called their mother on the first day. She sat beside him with her hand on his forehead, checking for a fever every hour. On the second day, she started poking his cheek to see if he would react.
It was mostly his own fault for not explaining the mechanics of his Path Skills in detail, but even he hadn't predicted that he'd be knocked out for fifty hours.
"You were like a corpse," she complained when he finally woke up. "A very warm, snoring corpse."
"Fallow Rest," Ashen croaked. "The skill's working like a charm."
"Uh-huh…" Lapis tilted her head curiously. "What drove your body so hard, anyway? It's the first time I've seen you so exhausted."
"You see that new pillar supporting the underground space? We hauled that around on our shoulders for three days straight while Narkals kept harassing us through it all. Heh."
"Oh." Lapis remembered the hundred-meter stone pillar, and her pink eyes went round, which Ashen found cute.
That thought startled him, so he shook his head and refocused on the effects of his Path Skills instead.
He could feel it the moment he sat up. His legs were denser; his shoulders were broader by a hair, and the ache that had burned through them on the march was gone, replaced by a solid steadiness that hadn't been there before.
His circuits hummed more smoothly too, and the ribs that had been bruised now felt like they could take a second tail swipe and shrug it off.
His body had taken every hardship he had sown into it and grown around it.
'This is Sloth hehehe,' he thought smugly, flexing his fingers. 'Work now, rest later. And let the rest do the real work.'
That became his rhythm.
On the surface, he sowed everything his body suffered. Underground, he slept it off and grew. Each expedition left him a little harder, a little faster, a little more resilient than the last.
The muscles thickened, the bones grew denser, the skin toughened, though Fallow Rest never erased his scars. It seemed to treat them as records of what his body had learned, and left them where they were.
There were limits, of course. The first time he sowed too much and pushed the harvest too long, the seeds soured. He woke up feeling as though a mountain had been dropped on him, and spent three days barely able to walk while Lapis fed him soup and lectured him the entire time.
Thankfully, he didn't make that mistake twice.