New Hunting Ground

The arrow from the hunter with the crossbow on his back landed at Helian Yuan's feet first.

The arrowhead sank two inches into the earth, its fletching still trembling.

"Any farther, and you're at my spring."

The voice came from behind a bush on the slope. The man had a short crossbow on his back and an old scarf covering his face, leaving only his eyes visible. From where he stood, he could see the spring and retreat into the woods at any moment.

Helian Yuan stopped without touching the arrow.

"The water flows out of the mountain. It isn't yours."

"I dug the channel, cleared the poisonous vines, and guarded it for three months," the hunter said. "You can drink, but don't skin anything upstream, and don't touch my traps."

"I'm only looking for a path."

"A path to where?"

"Sunken Bone Slope."

The hunter fell silent for a moment. His gaze swept over Helian Yuan's bare left foot, then shifted to his short spear and soaked pack. "You're here."

Helian Yuan took a small lump of salt from inside his robes and placed it beside the arrow. "For a flask of water."

"That's too much salt."

"The rest buys an answer. What can't I touch to the east?"

The hunter didn't take the salt immediately. He first came down the slope and pulled the arrow out with his foot. Only then did he speak. "Past the eastern rock wall is a level-four Blue Rock Panther's territory. South of the spring, there are level-three Ironback Mountain Badgers. Lots of burrows, thick armor. If meat is all you need, head west."

"Have any gray-robed people been here?"

The man's eyes turned cold. "The second question costs extra."

Helian Yuan broke off half the lump of salt.

Only then did the hunter take it. "Three days ago. They surveyed the land and drove in stakes. Didn't hunt. Asked me if I'd seen any magical beasts with iron rings."

"What did you tell them?"

"I said I had and told them to pay first."

"Did they?"

"No. So I haven't seen a thing."

He said it without a trace of embarrassment. He wasn't concealing anything for Helian Yuan's sake; he simply refused to give away his experience in his own hunting ground for free.

That made the boundaries between them clear.

Helian Yuan filled his water flask without asking the man's name. The hunter didn't ask his, either. They each lived off the mountain, and names were the least necessary things to exchange.

Before Helian Yuan left the spring, the hunter tapped the ground with the tip of his crossbow. "One more rule. Whoever leaves ashes first in the stone shelter north of the spring gets to use it for one night. You have to leave at daybreak, and you can't build stone walls."

"Why?"

"Building walls looks like claiming land. Anyone who claims land has to hold it, and if they can't, they'll bring both the panther and the gray-robed people down on us."

The hunters of Sunken Bone Slope kept no records on paper, but they had their own boundaries for using the land. Water from the spring could be exchanged, temporary stone shelters were shared in turn according to the ashes left behind, and animal trails and traps belonged to the people who cleared and maintained them. No one had put an official seal on the rules, yet everyone who needed to keep living here enforced them together.

It was a stark contrast to the gray-robed organization's numbering. One first asked what you had done and what you took responsibility for; the other merely entered hunting grounds and living creatures in a ledger.

At the spring, Helian Yuan only drank. He didn't wash his wounds or spread out the wet papers. He observed the boundaries not to please the hunter, but to avoid becoming someone no one was willing to share information with.

After leaving the spring, Helian Yuan surveyed the outskirts of Sunken Bone Slope.

The slope was pale because the soil was mixed with large amounts of old, powdered beast bone. There was a spring to the north, low burrow entrances all over the south, and claw marks from a level-four Blue Rock Panther on the eastern rock wall. The deepest gouge ran down from the height of a person's chest, and the stone chips were still fresh.

A boundary stake newly driven in by the gray-robed people stood halfway up the slope. The wood had been neatly cut, and there was no writing on top. Helian Yuan circled around to the back and found an iron nail buried at its base.

The number seven was carved into the nail's head.

The carving was shallow, but the surface had just been polished bright. Someone had recently taken it out for inspection and buried it again.

Number seven appeared not only in the old ledger but also as a marker on Sunken Bone Slope itself.

Helian Yuan didn't pull out the nail. He simply restored the surrounding soil to its original state. Farther away, he chose another stone and carved his own mark into it: two slanting lines, one long and one short. The long line pointed toward the spring, the short one toward his escape route.

It wasn't a declaration of territory.

It would simply spare him one decision if he was injured or traveling at night.

He didn't immediately follow the claw marks into the cluster of burrows. Instead, he placed a short blade of grass at each of three entrances. The wind blew in the same direction at all three, but only the tip of the grass at the middle entrance bent inward, showing that the main den connected to somewhere deeper. The other two might have been escape tunnels, or merely shallow holes meant to mislead prey.

Helian Yuan rolled a bone fragment inside. Five breaths later, the sound came from the southern entrance. The route was much longer than the distance aboveground. An Ironback Mountain Badger could circle behind someone underground. If a hunter watched only one entrance, he was waiting for it to choose where to bite him.

He withdrew up the slope to record his findings, taking care not to disturb the badgers. Today's goal was only to confirm the rules of the hunting ground, not to prove that he could kill a level-three magical beast while injured.

That afternoon, he found the trail of a level-three Ironback Mountain Badger. Its claw prints were short and deep, and its route always stayed close to burrow entrances and scattered rocks, showing that this kind of magical beast rarely left terrain it could burrow into. To hunt one, he would first have to account for the tunnels as part of the fight.

Farther away, the gnawed carcass of a level-two magical beast hung in the fork of a tree.

A mountain badger hadn't done it.

A level-four Blue Rock Panther would drag prey it couldn't finish eating up high to keep other magical beasts from stealing it. The edge of its territory had already reached south of the spring, closer than the hunter had said.

There were two old piles of ashes in the stone shelter, one dark and one light. The dark pile contained pine resin, from the kind of fire the hunter usually made. Mixed into the light ashes, however, were gray threads and tiny metal shavings, similar to what had been left in the records room at Blackwater Ravine. The gray-robed people had used the hunters' temporary shelter without leaving any public mark.

Helian Yuan didn't clear away the gray threads. He simply built his own fire between the two piles of ashes. If the hunter saw it tomorrow, he would know someone had crossed the boundary of "sharing the shelter in turn according to the ashes"; if the gray-robed people returned, they would also see that someone here refused to erase their traces for them.

After night fell, a brief twang of a crossbow string came from the spring. Helian Yuan didn't go out. The hunter was guarding his own spring, and the two of them had just exchanged a few words; that didn't mean Helian Yuan should treat every disturbance as a call for help. Only when no second twang came did he make a note of it: that shot had sounded more like a warning than a fight.

Before sunset, Helian Yuan had chosen an abandoned stone shelter for the night. He placed the iron nail, hemp rope, and map separately, then scattered a ring of fine ash outside the entrance.

In the latter half of the night, a trail of unfamiliar boot prints appeared in the ash.

The visitor hadn't entered the shelter, only stopped outside. The toes of the boots pointed toward where Helian Yuan had hidden the map, as though the visitor knew what he had brought out of Blackwater Ravine.

Helian Yuan followed the footprints for several dozen paces before the trail vanished beside the boundary stake.

Helian Yuan didn't pursue the boot prints. The tracks outside the shelter were too clear, as though they had been left to be seen. The person truly watching him might still have been higher up, waiting for him to reveal his hiding place after being provoked.

Instead, he put out the fire and moved to an empty crevice with no map or records, where he sat until dawn. If the visitor entered the shelter again, he would find only a pile of cold ashes; if he searched the outskirts instead, he would leave new footprints on the bone slope.

The iron nail marked with a seven beneath the boundary stake had been turned over.

The "seven" that had originally faced upward was now pressed into the soil.

Someone was using the same object to convey a second meaning: the marker had been seen, and there was now someone in the hunting ground who wasn't in the ledger.