The Forbidden Beast Forest began where the Jade Serpent Sect's training grounds ended, a wall of ancient trees so old that centuries of spiritual energy had saturated their bark, turning the wood iron-hard and dark as old blood. At night, the canopy swallowed the moonlight completely. By day, the light came through in thin, pale shafts that made the undergrowth look like something at the bottom of a very deep lake.
Wei Tianlong had been walking through it for two days, and he was very close to running out of options.
The outer disciples' annual Spiritual Root Confirmation Ceremony was, in practice, a culling. Every year the sect masters selected the bottom third of outer disciples, assigned them a simple task, survive three days in the Forbidden Beast Forest's outer ring, return with at least one beast core, and waited to see who came back. Those who succeeded retained their place in the sect. Those who failed became the sect's former problem.
Wei Tianlong had every intention of succeeding. He had managed, through two days of exhausting patience, to track and collect a single beast core from a First Realm Scaled Rabbit, small, unprepossessing, barely worth the effort. It was enough. Just barely enough. He had been making his way back toward the forest boundary when Wei Yun found him.
Five against one, in the forest, with no witnesses. Wei Yun had always had a talent for arithmetic.
They had taken the core. They had taken his rations and his only defensive talisman. Two of them had held him while the third worked on his ribs with methodical professionalism, and then Wei Yun had crouched down to where Wei Tianlong was on his knees in the dirt and spoken very quietly, the way he always did when he wanted to be certain he was heard.
"Cousin," Wei Yun had said, "do yourself a favour. Walk deeper into the forest and keep walking. It will save everyone the embarrassment of watching them carry your corpse back."
Now Wei Tianlong was crouched behind a mossy boulder, breathing around his cracked ribs, and performing a serious accounting of his remaining resources. Forty percent Qi reserves. No talismans. No food. Cracked third and fourth ribs on the right side, which meant his basic Earth Qi compression technique — the only combat-viable technique available to a cultivator of his grade, was going to produce about seventy percent of its normal output on account of the pain. One night left before the trial ended.
He stood up. He had allowed himself exactly five breaths of despair. He was done with those.
There was one option left. The middle ring of the Forbidden Beast Forest was officially off-limits to outer disciples, for the simple reason that its beasts started at the Third Realm of Evolution and went significantly upward from there. An outer disciple at Qi Condensation Third Layer, which was all Wei Tianlong was, after nine years of cultivating a Fragmented Earth Root at one-fifth the speed of a normal cultivator, had no business in the middle ring.
Wei Tianlong walked into the middle ring anyway. If he came back with a middle-ring beast core, the trial examiners would not ask how he had obtained it. They never did. Results were the only language that mattered.
---
He smelled the blood before he saw the source of it.
In a clearing ringed by three ancient stone pillars, something enormous had collapsed. It took several disoriented seconds for Wei Tianlong to process what he was looking at, because his mind did not initially accept the possibility. Azure Dragons were creatures of legend, even a juvenile one represented a degree of spiritual power that most cultivators would never encounter in their lifetime.
This one was juvenile. Perhaps twenty meters from snout to tail, with scales the deep blue-green of ocean water in the deeps and eyes the colour of lightning before it strikes. It had been magnificent, once. Now it was pinned under the remnants of a collapsed suppression array, iron-dark chains threaded with containment runes wrapped around its body in a dozen places, and three human cultivators were working methodically around it with the focused attention of professionals doing a job.
Wei Tianlong recognized the crescent-moon insignia on their robes without difficulty. Crescent Moon Pavilion. One of the so-called Ghost Sects, cultivation organizations that operated in the space between sect law and outright banditry, doing the things that legitimate sects needed done without the inconvenience of documentation.
The array carved around the dragon was a live-harvest extraction circle. Its purpose was to remove a beast's spiritual core while the beast was still alive, because a living extraction produced a core of significantly higher quality than one taken from a corpse. It was also significantly more agonising for the beast in question. The practice was technically illegal within the territory of any major sect. The Crescent Moon Pavilion, operating in the Jade Serpent Sect's middle ring, was flagrantly in violation of the mutual jurisdiction treaty.
Every fibre of Wei Tianlong's survival instinct told him to back away quietly.
The dragon turned its head.
It looked directly at him with one enormous lightning-coloured eye. The look lasted perhaps two seconds. In that time, Wei Tianlong catalogued what he saw in it: exhaustion that went beyond the physical, pain that had long since burned past the point where any creature could still fear it, and at the very bottom, so faint it might have been his imagination, a question that needed no language to convey.
Will anyone help?
Wei Tianlong took a slow breath. His cracked ribs informed him, unambiguously, that this was a terrible idea.
He stepped into the clearing.
"Stop what you're doing," he said.
The three cultivators turned. Their assessment of him was swift, dismissive, and professionally accurate. Third-layer Qi Condensation. Outer disciple robes. No visible weapons. No active spiritual pressure. The oldest of the three, a lean man with a forked topknot and the particular boredom of someone who had been doing dangerous work for long enough that it had stopped feeling that way , let out a short, uninflected laugh.
"Third layer Qi Condensation," the man said, with the tone of someone reading a very unimpressive report. "Boy, you can leave, or you can stay and become a secondary harvest. Your core is small but your meridian blood has refining value."
Wei Tianlong's mouth was dry. His hands were trembling slightly, which he was quietly grateful no one could see clearly in the dim forest light. He had no talisman, no beast, no combat technique above elementary grade, and approximately the worst opening position imaginable.
He also had a very thorough knowledge of sect law, because reading was the one cultivation resource available to a disciple who could not afford to waste Qi on social activities.
"The Jade Serpent Sect's mutual jurisdiction treaty with the Crescent Moon Pavilion," Wei Tianlong said, keeping his voice level, "prohibits live-harvest extraction within the sect's territorial boundaries. You are currently conducting an illegal extraction in the Jade Serpent Sect's middle ring. I am formally witnessing this violation. If you proceed, I am legally obligated to report it, and the Enforcement Hall will act on the filing."
A pause that stretched a little longer than the first one.
"You would have to survive to report it," the man said.
"Yes," Wei Tianlong agreed. "I would."
The fight that followed was brief, painful, and deeply educational for everyone involved.
---
Wei Tianlong discovered several things about himself in the following three minutes. He discovered that the specific willingness to endure pain that cultivators who prized their bodies as precious cultivation vessels could not bring themselves to demonstrate was, in practice, a significant tactical advantage. He took a blade across the left forearm. He took a Qi-Strike to the chest that cracked two more ribs and sent him through the dirt. He got back up both times. He created enough targeted chaos , a palm strike to a knee joint here, a fistful of dirt into an eye at exactly the wrong moment there , that the three cultivators eventually ran the numbers.
The dragon's extraction was forty percent complete. A formal violation report backed by a live witness was a serious legal liability. The Crescent Moon Pavilion's standing with the major sects was already precarious. An outer disciple with five cracked ribs was, in the abstract, not a serious threat. An outer disciple with five cracked ribs and the stubborn refusal to go down was, in practice, significantly more inconvenient than the harvest was worth.
They left.
Wei Tianlong sat down very carefully in the dirt beside the chained dragon and, after a moment, passed out.