The Hunt

The scorching heat gradually subsided as the blood-red setting sun cast its last rays.

Zhang Xuezhou poked his head out the window and looked at the sky as night began to fall. Only then did he realize the grueling day was finally over.

It was hard to get comfortable in such heat. There was no cooling device, no chilled water, and no tall buildings to block the relentless sunlight.

Even the house where he lived let in faint traces of sunlight.

Heaven and earth were like a steamer, and he was the poor worm inside it.

In weather like this, Zhang Xuezhou only wanted to play dead in a bucket of water and wait for the day to pass quietly.

"Good thing I don't have to practice martial arts with those bulls!"

Zhang Xuezhou craned his neck and looked toward the center of the village, more than two hundred meters away.

It was a favorite gathering place for the village's young people, as well as the place where they practiced martial arts.

Their training was nothing profound. They simply practiced archery, honing their muscle memory and eyesight over and over.

In these times, anyone who wanted a full belly needed to know how to hunt with a bow.

Only by hunting wild beasts could the villagers keep themselves supplied with meat and build strong bodies.

Survival skills were a necessity for everyone. Not only did the young have to train of their own accord, but their parents, the clan chief, the elders, and other respected figures also urged them on.

Zhang Xuezhou could slack off not because he held an important position in the village, nor because he was some village princeling. He was simply weak.

Though he was nearly an adult, Zhang Xuezhou could barely lift a hundred-jin millstone.

Compared with Zhang Changgong, the leader of the young people, who could easily hold up a four-hundred-jin iron block with his arms outstretched, Zhang Xuezhou's strength was nothing to show off. He even struggled to draw an ordinary bow.

The village did not support idlers. Unable to make it in martial arts, Zhang Xuezhou learned to count and calculate for a living.

Apart from learning to read and write, arithmetic was the most important thing he studied.

The beasts brought back from hunts, the crops of varying quality after harvest...

In the village, every kind of yield had to be counted, and each household's contribution weighed up before the harvest could be divided.

Working out a fair balance was extremely easy for Zhang Xuezhou; it was only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. But doing the job properly, avoiding an unfair distribution, and convincing everyone to accept their share without resentment-that took skill.

The people who did this job in the village were never popular. They were bound to offend someone.

Even the clan chief and the respected elders got headaches over distributing food and could only keep pushing out scapegoats to share the pressure.

Whenever someone could no longer do the job, the elders would replace them with someone else.

The position kept rotating, with a newcomer taking over every three to five years.

After enough rotations, Zhang Xuezhou, who had been following along as an apprentice, was pushed to the forefront.

"Kid Zhou, the hunting party will be back any moment! Grab the scale beam and weight and get ready to work!"

More than a hundred meters away, Second Elder Zhang Houtu, who was overseeing the young people's training, called out.

Zhang Xuezhou promptly answered and jumped out of the large wooden tub full of water.

He hastily threw on a coarse cloth shirt, then picked up the large steelyard that symbolized fairness and justice in the village.

It could weigh a thousand jin. Its beam was over two meters long, and its weight alone was ten jin.

There was nothing unusual about its size. Zhang Xuezhou had once weighed a mountain boar that tipped the scales at over eight hundred jin.

The village had more than three hundred people, and seven-tenths of their food depended on what the hunting party brought back.

Whether they ate grass or meat depended on the village team's abilities.

Zhang Xuezhou picked up the steelyard and strode out of the mud-walled house.

At the village entrance, the cheerful barking of hunting dogs and the sound of voices drew closer.

Whenever the hunting party returned, the village grew as lively as it was during a festival.

Young people practicing martial arts, the elderly and children, farmers from the fields, and women busy with needlework all gathered in the village center.

"Brother Xuezhou, give my family a little extra meat later. My mother hasn't eaten any in half a month!"

"All they've hunted this month are crows and sparrows. There are barely a few liang of meat and a pile of bones. It's nowhere near enough to fill our bellies."

"Zhang Cigong, your mother hasn't eaten meat in half a month because she gave it all to you, didn't she? If you ate a few bites less, she'd have some. Why should you get extra?"

Amid the clamor, some tried to curry favor with Zhang Xuezhou, while others made sarcastic remarks.

Food was as important as heaven. No matter how good a friendship was, it could sour in the face of hunger.

Had he not spent so long among them, Zhang Xuezhou would have found it hard to understand how people's emotions changed when they lacked food.

He jogged behind the limping Second Elder, calling out, "Everyone will get meat," as he watched the young men pulling open the village gate.

Whether they got meat, and whether they got a larger share, depended less on his distribution than on what the hunting party had brought back today.

Four young men strained to pull the heavy wooden gate open.

As soon as a gap appeared, the hunting dogs slipped through, wagging their tails cheerfully.

The heavy footsteps of many tall, sturdy men and women carrying bows, arrows, and curved sabers reached his ears.

Zhang Xuezhou was delighted, and joy appeared on many other faces as well.

There was an obvious difference between the footsteps of someone carrying a heavy load and someone carrying a light one.

The lighter the steps, the smaller the haul.

The heavier the steps, the greater the haul was bound to be.

This was the weight of a bountiful hunt.

When the village gate was fully open, many of the villagers welcoming the hunting party hesitantly retreated a couple of steps.

Even Zhang Xuezhou, who considered himself brave, could not help feeling a chill.

They were used to seeing wolves, tigers, leopards, and other fierce beasts, but they rarely saw pythons, let alone a gigantic venomous one.

This python had even grown a single horn, so it must have been extremely old.

Zhang Xuezhou glanced at the python's sickeningly mottled colors, and his pupils contracted slightly.

Even when dead or maimed, some vicious creatures still gave off a warning to keep away, inspiring fear at a glance.

Two curved sabers had been driven into the side of the python's head, their blades buried to the hilt.

One was clan chief Zhang Baojia's ox-ear saber. Sharp enough to pierce a turtle's shell, it had tremendous penetrating power, and Zhang Baojia ordinarily treasured it as his own life.

The other was the Wind-Breaking Saber.

As its name suggested, the Wind-Breaking Saber could cut through even the wind. Though that was something of an exaggeration, it was still a rare fine blade.

More importantly, its owner was Zhang Xuezhou's father, Zhang Zhong.

Zhang Zhong's strength ranked in the upper middle of the village, but with that saber, he had become the hunting party's second-in-command.

Now that both sabers were buried in the python's head, Zhang Xuezhou knew without checking that only a trace of its fearsome might remained, and it was unlikely to hurt anyone.

"There's poison on its skin, you little idiot! Don't go touching it!"

The hunting party had more than forty members, each possessing extraordinary strength, but this python was over three zhang long, forcing half the party to carry it.

Zhang Baojia scolded Zhang Changgong, who was itching to touch the vicious creature, and the bold young man immediately pulled his hand back.

"Can we eat a poisonous python like this?"

Zhang Changgong could not resist asking.

"When you're hungry, you can gnaw on tree bark, but give you meat and you can't stomach it?" Zhang Baojia scolded. "You're too young to be so picky. With a vicious creature like this around, there won't be a large beast in sight for a hundred li. Who knows when we'll eat meat again?"

"Xuezhou, give me two extra jin! I'll carry ten buckets of water for your family tomorrow!"

Zhang Baojia's words put an end to Zhang Changgong's pickiness, and he turned to currying favor instead, immediately provoking another round of jeers and curses.

"Remove the fangs, drain the poisonous blood, skin it, and take out all the poison veins. The rest of this python is good meat!" Zhang Zhong said in a deep voice.

"While it's still fresh, everyone lend a hand," Zhang Baojia shouted. "Bring the village's big bloodletting tub and draw a few basins of water!"

As the giant python entered the village, the eyes of the people who had waited so long for meat lit up, and everyone helped in their own way.

Zhang Xuezhou set down the steelyard, and Zhang Zhong and the others began weighing the whole carcass.

"The beam isn't long enough. This giant python weighs at least two thousand..."

Seeing that the beam still hung high in the air even with the weight at its far end, Zhang Xuezhou made a rough estimate.

He blurted out the figure he had guessed, only to see a glance shoot from the giant python's nearly white eyes.

Violence, cruelty, bloodlust, viciousness...

Under the giant python's gaze, Zhang Xuezhou felt that its eyes were filled with far too many negative emotions.

If it could, Zhang Xuezhou had no doubt the giant python wanted to slaughter everyone in the village.

"That makes no sense. This damned thing is actually that heavy!" Zhang Baojia cursed.

After years of weighing things, Zhang Xuezhou had developed an excellent ability to estimate their weight.

Zhang Baojia felt that his own estimate differed considerably from Zhang Xuezhou's.

Of course, Zhang Xuezhou's word was the one that counted. After all, Zhang Baojia only knew how to send a blade in clean and pull it out bloody; calculations were not his specialty.

Even so, the giant python's weight was far beyond Zhang Baojia's estimate.

Though he was not very good at judging weight, he should not have been off by hundreds of jin.

"With this length, this size, this... forget it. We'll know once we chop it in two and weigh it again!"

He could not understand why his estimate had been so poor. By the time the large wooden bloodletting tub arrived, he had already yanked his ox-ear saber from the giant python's head and swiftly slashed at the vulnerable spot seven inches down its body.

The ox-ear saber struck heavily, and the python's body gave a feeble twitch before the crowd pinned it down.

When Zhang Zhong followed up with the Wind-Breaking Saber, blood burst from the giant python's body like a fountain.

Zhang Xuezhou thought he heard a faint popping sound in the air, and a faint, fruity fragrance drifted out in waves.

The air seemed to grow a little sweet.

"The damned thing had to fart before it died!"

Zhang Baojia cursed and probed inside with his ox-ear saber, hooking out a white snake sinew.

"Good sinew. It'll make a top-grade bowstring... why is there a chicken's head too?"

As he pulled the sinew upward, the python's writhing body forced what it had swallowed up from its belly.

Zhang Baojia saw the head of an enormous five-colored golden pheasant pulled out of the snake's belly along with it.

Like the python they had captured, the five-colored golden pheasant still had a breath of life left. Its head was swollen to the size of a pig's, and a trace of relief and bewilderment showed in its eyes.

Zhang Baojia immediately understood the main reason they had managed to hunt down this vicious beast, as well as why his estimate of its weight had been so wildly wrong.

"The poisoned parts can't be eaten!"

He reached out and seized the snake sinew, his ox-ear saber flashing through the air.

But as the ox-ear saber stabbed toward the five-colored golden pheasant's head, another blade swept lightly past, faster than his own.

The five-colored golden pheasant's head immediately flew high into the air.

It had fought fiercely with the python, holding its own against it and clinging to a breath of life even now. Though the five-colored golden pheasant's name sounded auspicious, it was clearly no harmless creature.

It was far beyond wolves, tigers, leopards, and other fierce beasts, and there was no telling what might happen if it recovered its strength.

Zhang Baojia had struck fast, and so had Zhang Zhong.

One slash sent the chicken's head flying, and the popping sound rang out in the air once more.

The sweet-smelling air from before immediately condensed into a small cloud of mist.

This work is still in my usual style. Since the framework is already set, it's hard to break away from it when writing a long story, so the writing leans a little more toward logic. Please keep reading; this fairly lighthearted story shouldn't disappoint!

One more thing: this book isn't in the "mental illness" genre. A misdiagnosis at the hospital merely led to some medication being taken, which prompted a change in personality. Aside from that, there's nothing else.