No Debts of Gratitude

The old hunter prepared to leave before dawn.

He retightened the cloth around his wrist and slung his old bow over his shoulder, leaving even the half piece of dried meat in the beast's den behind. Helian Yuan was stitching the wound at his waist. He looked up but did not stop him.

"You can't go back to Greystone Town," he said.

"The town doesn't belong to anyone."

"They'll question you again."

"Let them." The old hunter bent down and ducked out of the den. "I sold the map, and I took the money. Other than that, I don't know your name, I don't know where you live, and I never saw any shadow."

He spoke as though rehearsing his statement in advance.

Helian Yuan bit through the thread. "You saw the blank tag?"

The old hunter paused.

During their retreat last night, a corner of the blank wooden tag had slipped out of Helian Yuan's sleeve. For someone who had survived in the mountains for decades, even a corner was enough.

"All I saw was you risk your life to save someone who wasn't going to follow you," the old hunter said. "That was stupid. It had nothing to do with the tag."

Helian Yuan offered no explanation.

The old hunter walked a few steps, then pulled a hard, dried fruit pit from his robes and tossed it on the ground. Three old knife marks were carved into it, a wayfinding sign once used by the Blackwater Ravine escort team.

"Number seven wasn't sent in from town," he said.

Helian Yuan looked up.

"More than ten years ago, I hauled salt for a merchant caravan at the Inner Mountain Entrance. Back then, there weren't so many boundary markers on Sunken Bone Slope. Someone pushed a covered cart out from inside. Its wheels were caked in black mud, and there was nothing written on the cart. One of the people traveling with us asked about it, and the man in charge of the cart only said, 'The seventh slot is empty. Don't enter a name yet.'"

"Why didn't you say so before?"

"Because I didn't know you were looking for seven then."

"You know now?"

"I still don't." The old hunter looked at Helian Yuan's sleeve. "I only heard the gray-robed men say, when they were interrogating me, 'The blank name goes back inside the mountain. Leave no one alive on the old road.'"

It was not an answer, but it connected events from more than ten years ago to the present.

Number seven might have been assigned to a different target, or even to more than one beast.

The old hunter's words, "The seventh slot is empty," also changed Helian Yuan's understanding of the number. Seven was not necessarily the seventh beast. It could be the seventh cage, the seventh transport route, or the seventh empty slot excluded from the ordinary master register. Until now, everyone had followed the number in search of a specific answer, but the organization might have been exploiting that very habit to keep outsiders chasing the wrong "seventh one" forever.

The new question was more specific and more difficult: he needed to find not what number seven was called, but who had the authority to decide what the person or beast in the empty slot was called. What truly remained unchanged was not any individual, but the system of the "seventh empty slot." Whoever was put into it lost their original name, and after the retrieval was complete, the record keeper would decide what it was.

Helian Yuan picked up the fruit pit. "Where is the Inner Mountain Entrance?"

The old hunter did not answer directly. With his toe, he drew a curved line in the dirt, tapped three dots along its middle, then scuffed it away.

"You saved me once. I'll give you one answer in return."

"That was more than one."

"Then don't count the rest as a debt of gratitude."

The old hunter turned and headed down the slope.

Helian Yuan watched him go without following or warning him again about the gray-robed men's checkpoints. The man had made it clear he would not travel with him; any further persuasion would turn the act of saving his life into a debt.

Half an hour later, a bowstring twanged softly in the woods. It was not a fight; it sounded more like the old hunter had tapped a tree trunk with a blunt arrow. After that, there was no further sound.

Using the three marks on the fruit pit, Helian Yuan found an old gully on the southern edge of the map, cut off by a watercourse. The curved line matched the gully's course, and the three dots matched three landslides. The Inner Mountain Entrance was not at the northern gully where the live cage was currently headed, but on a transport road farther south that had not been used for years.

The gray-robed men had deliberately turned the empty cage north to send whoever stole the tag in the wrong direction.

The old hunter's information had put him back on the right track, but it also raised a new question: if the seventh empty slot had existed for more than ten years, today's number seven might not be the same one as back then. "Transferred out" on the master list, "awaiting retrieval" on the supplementary page, and "name to be added upon live return" on the live cage tag might record different stages, or even different targets.

Helian Yuan spread the three sheets side by side.

The master list focused on destinations, the supplementary page on status, and the live cage tag on naming. They did not contradict one another: a target could have been transferred out of the seventh slot, then gone missing, and still occupied the seventh empty slot when it was retrieved. Or the original target in the seventh slot might already have disappeared, and the organization had put a new, nameless target into the same entry.

The papers alone could not tell him which it was.

He had to go to the Inner Mountain Entrance and look for traces of transport.

But before that, the retrieval team was about to capture the Blue Rock Panther. The chain net, drug canisters, and Throat-Locking Wind Wolf brought by the gray-robed men were all in place. Once the panther was loaded into the live cage, the most dangerous and effective barrier on the eastern side of Sunken Bone Slope would disappear. The route through the Inner Mountain Entrance might also be closed once the convoy passed.

Helian Yuan felt his right arm. He had not used Shadow Cover while saving the hunter yesterday, but the old injury was still swollen from the crossbow bolt's impact and the running. If he forced the shadow onto himself during the retrieval operation, his arm could withstand at most one full exertion.

Whether once was enough depended on where he used that strike.

That afternoon, he returned to the edge of the Blue Rock Panther's territory. The panther did not appear, but several fresh crossbow marks had appeared on the rock face. Small pieces of scabbed blood littered the ground. The retrieval team had already tested the panther once, deliberately using the Throat-Locking Wind Wolf to force it to reveal the direction of its pounce.

The level-three Wind Wolf's paw prints formed a semicircle in the mud, abruptly straightening whenever they reached the range of the iron whistle. It was not a companion, but a tool trained to drive beasts along a fixed route.

Following the paw prints, Helian Yuan found a short length of broken chain. Its links were thin, but they contained cyan metal powder that could resonate with the Wind Wolf's collar. The retrieval team planned to use the Wind Wolf to force the panther into position, then tighten the chain net from both sides.

The method did not require them to defeat a level-four magical beast. They only needed to make it retreat in fear to the same spot every time.

After examining the area, Helian Yuan withdrew.

He could not confront the entire retrieval team head-on for the Blue Rock Panther, nor did he need to save a magical beast that had nearly killed him. He only needed to keep the panther from retreating in the direction they expected at the most critical moment.

That evening, Helian Yuan began practicing Shadow Cover in a clearing.

On the first attempt, he only let Tiger Shadow cling to his wrist. His right arm exerted no force.

On the second, he extended it to his elbow, used his short spear to lift a stone, and immediately withdrew it.

On the third, the black shadow closed around his shoulders and back. He did not thrust his spear, but stood and endured the force that pulled his joints into a straight line.

After six breaths, his right hand could still grip the spear.

Helian Yuan added another line in a blank space in the secret manual: stronger is not always better; first, let the shadow stop where it is needed.

As night fell, the first copper bell rang from the east.

Before putting away the map, Helian Yuan buried the fruit pit the old hunter had left at the entrance to the beast's den rather than take it onto the battlefield. It was neither a keepsake nor a new signal for a future meeting. The information had served its purpose; carrying it any longer would only turn it into evidence pointing to the old hunter if he were searched. He could remember the actions that came from a connection without keeping every object as something that could implicate others.

Only then did he pick up his short spear.

The retrieval team began closing the net.