The forest food situation is not great.
I mean, it's not nothing. There are berries — the kind that old man Shen says are safe, which I choose to believe because the alternative is stressful. Some roots that taste like dirt but fill you up. A few mushrooms that Liu Hao identified with the confidence of someone who has definitely never had food poisoning.
But there are a lot of people in that little cabin.
And everyone is trying very hard not to look hungry, which is how I know everyone is absolutely starving.
Little Carp ate her portion in about four seconds and then sat there staring at the empty bowl with the saddest eyes I have ever seen on a human being. I had to look away.
"We should search further into the forest," old man Shen says. He's the low-tier cultivator — I found that out about an hour ago. His arm is bandaged and he moves carefully, but his eyes are sharp. "There will be beasts deeper in. I can handle the hunting."
"I'll go," Liu Hao says immediately.
"I'm coming too," I say.
Liu Hao looks at me. "You don't have to—"
"I'm coming," I say again.
She looks at me for another second. Then she turns away. "Fine. Don't slow us down."
I choose to take that as a warm invitation.
The forest gets darker fast once you're past the first line of trees.
I stay close to the other two, which is easy because old man Shen moves slow and careful and Liu Hao moves like she's trying not to make noise. I move like a normal person, which apparently is too loud based on the look Liu Hao keeps giving me.
"You're stomping," she says.
"I'm walking."
"Same thing apparently."
I lower my feet more carefully. It helps maybe twenty percent.
We find edible stuff as we go — I spot a cluster of wild vegetables tucked under a fallen log, the kind my mom used to add to soup. Old man Shen looks at me sideways when I point them out. I shrug. "My mom cooked a lot."
Further in, I find a berry bush, fat and dark purple. I pop one in my mouth before either of them can say anything.
"Qin Mu—" Liu Hao starts, horrified.
"Sweet," I report. "Good. These are good."
She stares at me. "You could have just died."
"But I didn't." I start picking them into the cloth bag old man Shen brought. "My mom taught me what to look for. These are fine."
Liu Hao watches me for a moment with an expression I can't fully read. Then she starts helping pick without another word.
We're doing okay. Not great, but okay.
And then old man Shen stops walking.
He holds up a fist — the universal signal for stop and shut up — and I actually listen for once.
From somewhere deeper in the trees comes a sound.
Low. Rumbling. Like thunder that forgot to come with rain.
Old man Shen's eyes go wide. "...Iron Feather Razorclaw," he breathes.
"A what?" I whisper.
He points.
I look.
And then I forget how to speak for a solid five seconds.
It's a chicken.
I mean — it's not just a chicken. It's a chicken the way a mountain is just a rock. It's standing in the small clearing ahead of us, pecking at the ground, completely unbothered, and it is the size of a large elephant. Its feathers are dark grey and catch the last of the light like metal. Its feet alone are bigger than I am.
It is, without question, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Because all I can think — all my brain is producing, all my instincts are saying — is:
Roasted chicken.
The smell. I can already imagine the smell. Crispy skin and fat dripping into a fire and the kind of heat that you feel from three meters away and—
"We take the core," old man Shen whispers next to me. "Beast core from a Razorclaw this size — we can trade it. Medicine, supplies, everything the survivors need."
"Right," I whisper back. My eyes have not left the chicken. "The core. Obviously."
"Qin Mu." Liu Hao's voice is very quiet and very flat. "I can see your face."
"My face is fine."
"You're drooling."
"I am not—" I wipe my mouth. Okay. Minor drooling. Irrelevant. "Can we focus?"
Old man Shen is already moving into position, slow and careful. Liu Hao rolls her shoulders, one hand finding the hilt of her sword. She glances at me. "Stay back. This isn't something you can—"
The giant chicken turns its head.
One enormous eye finds us.
It makes a sound like a thunderclap wearing a beak.
"GO!" old man Shen shouts, and all three of us move at once.
Liu Hao is something else when she actually fights.
I've trained with her. I've seen her correct my posture about eight hundred times and demonstrate techniques with the kind of lazy perfection that makes me want to quit. But this is different.
Her sword comes out and her free hand moves — a flowing gesture, fingers tracing shapes in the air — and something shifts, like the air itself listens to her. She's already moving toward the Razorclaw, fast and deliberate, and when her blade connects it's not brute force, it's precision — like she's finding the exact right place every single time.
The beast screams. A real hit. First strike.
Old man Shen goes in from the other side. He's strong — I can see that, the way the ground shakes slightly when he plants his feet, the way his punch lands with a sound like a log splitting. The Razorclaw turns toward him, annoyed.
It flicks one wing.
Old man Shen goes sideways about four meters.
He gets up immediately, spits on the ground, and goes right back in. I'll give him that.
I circle around the outside, watching, looking for an opening. Liu Hao lands another strike — third, fourth — the beast is turning, trying to track both of them, its feet churning up the forest floor.
Its feet.
I look at its feet.
Then I look at the trees around the clearing. The old ones, the kind with long trailing vines hanging off every branch.
I look back at its feet.
An idea lands in my brain fully formed and I don't think about it long enough to talk myself out of it.
I run.
Not at the chicken. Past it, toward the trees. I grab the first vine — thick, long, rough in my hands — and yank it down. Then another. I'm moving faster than I usually do, that weird speed that shows up sometimes and surprises me, and I'm across the clearing and behind the Razorclaw before it notices me.
Liu Hao glances over mid-strike and her eyes go wide. "What are you—"
"HOLD IT STILL," I yell.
"I'm a little busy—"
The beast plants its feet to lunge at her.
I loop the first vine around its right ankle and pull.
It doesn't fall — it's too big to fall from one vine — but it stumbles, just for a second, just enough. I get the second vine around the left foot, tie it off on a tree root, and then I'm just sitting there in the dirt holding two vine-ends connected to the feet of a giant chicken and laughing because I cannot believe that worked even a little bit.
"NOW," I shout.
Old man Shen hits it from the left.
Liu Hao's hand signs blur — something faster, something that pulls a sound out of the air like a drawn breath — and her blade finds the right spot, clean and certain.
The Razorclaw makes one more thunderclap sound.
Then it sits down, very slowly, like it's just very tired.
Then it stops moving.
Silence.
Old man Shen is breathing hard. Liu Hao lowers her sword, chest rising and falling, and looks at me still sitting in the dirt holding my vines.
"...That was the plan?" she says.
"It worked," I say.
"It barely worked."
"Barely counts."
Old man Shen huffs something that might be a laugh. He moves toward the beast, careful, and starts working on extracting the core.
I stand up, brush the dirt off my clothes, and look at the Razorclaw.
It really is enormous.
"Hey," I say casually. "So. About the rest of it."
Liu Hao looks at me.
"We can't just leave all this meat," I say. "There are kids back there, Liu Hao. Little Carp ate her dinner in four seconds. Four."
Liu Hao opens her mouth.
"Four seconds," I repeat.
She closes her mouth.
Old man Shen is easier to convince than I expected. He has grandchildren apparently — he doesn't say it outright, but something in his face when I mention Little Carp shifts, and he agrees before Liu Hao does.
Liu Hao takes longer.
She says it's wasteful. She says beast meat from something this size isn't meant for eating. She says there are proper channels for this kind of thing.
I start gathering firewood.
"I'm serious, Qin Mu—"
I start building the fire.
"Are you even listening to me?"
I find two flat rocks that'll work as a cooking surface.
Liu Hao stands there watching me with her arms crossed. "This is ridiculous," she says.
"Mm," I agree pleasantly.
Old man Shen sits down on a log nearby and says nothing. He's watching Liu Hao the way someone watches a person who is about to do something they've already decided to do.
The fire catches.
The smell starts almost immediately — fat and heat and something that makes my mouth actually water for real this time, not just from imagination. Old man Shen shifts on his log. Liu Hao's arms uncross slightly.
I pretend not to notice.
Ten minutes later old man Shen says, quietly, "...Just a little wouldn't hurt."
I hand him a piece without a word.
Liu Hao watches him eat. She watches the fire. She watches me very carefully not looking at her.
"Fine," she says, at last, with enormous dignity. "A small piece. For practical reasons."
"Of course," I say.
"Because we can't carry it all back."
"Absolutely."
"Don't look so smug."
"I'm not smug, I'm just—"
"You're extremely smug."
I hand her a piece. She takes it. She eats it with her chin up and her expression completely neutral and I have to look at the fire very hard to keep from grinning.
Getting the Razorclaw back to camp is a whole other problem.
We can't carry the whole thing — obviously. But we get enough, wrapped in broad leaves and tied with the same vines I used earlier, that it's a real haul. Old man Shen takes one end. I take the other. Liu Hao carries the beast core wrapped carefully in cloth and refuses to help with the meat on principle, which I respect.
We hear the camp before we see it — low voices, a child laughing once, the sound of the fire.
Then we break through the tree line.
Chen Wei is sitting near the cabin entrance. She looks up when she hears us.
She looks at me.
She looks at old man Shen.
She looks at what we're carrying between us.
Then she looks back at me.
"...What," she says, "is that."
"Dinner," I say.
"That is not—" She stands up, staring at the enormous bundle of meat. "Where did you even — how did you—"
"There was a beast," I say. "We got the core. And also the chicken."
"It's not a chicken—"
"It has feathers and it pecks things, Chen Wei."
She stares at me for a long moment.
Then she looks at Liu Hao, who is standing slightly to the side holding the core with perfect posture and an expression of complete innocence.
"Liu Hao," Chen Wei says slowly. "Did you eat some already."
Liu Hao says nothing.
"Liu Hao."
"...The fire was already going," Liu Hao says finally. "It would have been wasteful not to."
From somewhere nearby, Little Carp appears. She looks at the bundle. She looks up at me.
"Is that food?" she asks.
"Yeah," I say. "A lot of it."
Her face does something enormous and she turns around and screams into the camp, "FOOD! REAL FOOD!" with the full lung capacity of a child who has been eating forest berries for weeks.
The cabin erupts.
I set my end of the bundle down, stretch my back, and look up at the sky through the trees. Dark now, almost fully. Stars starting to come out.
Chen Wei appears beside me.
She doesn't say anything for a moment.
"Thank you," she says, quietly.
I shrug. "Little Carp ate her dinner in four seconds."
Chen Wei is quiet again. Then: "Liu Hao really ate some already."
"She said it was for practical reasons."
Chen Wei makes a sound that is almost — almost — a laugh.
Around us, the camp comes alive. Fire gets built up bigger. People crowd around. Someone finds a way to rig a proper spit. The smell rolls out through the trees and even the adults who were trying to be dignified about the whole thing stop trying pretty quickly.
I sit down on a log near the fire and watch it all and think about my mom's kitchen and roasted things and the sound of people eating when they're actually hungry and finally getting to.
It's not the same.
But it's something.