Fay approached the bison as if she were walking up to a shrine that might bite.

It was no common beast. It stood more than three meters tall, all horn and muscle.

"Fay. I trusted you with the treasure. It's just a bison now. Move." Radeon said, encouraging her.

He watched and saw the fear in the tightness of her shoulders, in the way her breath caught.

Fay's hands still reached out, though, slow and trembling with wonder.

Her fingers found the creature's foreleg, warm and corded beneath the fur.

Radeon let his surplus of vitality spill through her like a quiet current and then he drew it onward into the bison.

His own technique, borrowed in shape from an older art but fed with life instead of qi.

The manual's memory rose with it, the imprint of the tamer who had penned the method.

In his mind's eye the man had no face at all, only a blank where features should have been.

Radeon did not pry. Some doors opened onto heights that snapped weaker necks.

Mortal apotheosis was not a tale for campfires.

The seventh stage of cultivation stripped away mortal bindings and left a cultivator ready to ascend to a higher stage.

As Radeon channeled the energy through the woman and the animal, Fay met his expectations.

Heaven's child. The vitality flowed clean through her, no grit, no resistance.

The bison lowered its massive head and licked her palm with a tongue like rough leather.

Fay's lips parted, and a smile took her before she could stop it.

A heartbeat later it knelt, then shifted so she could climb.

Radeon steadied her elbow, guided her foot, and kept his touch light.

Fay needed to feel the weight under her as her own victory. Confidence was a thing you built plank by plank.

Radeon had plans that stretched past this forest. Past this realm.

When Fay was settled, Radeon sent a thought through the link and the bison opened its mouth.

His stick body lifted and slid between those blunt teeth without being crushed.

Radeon thickened himself, swelling to the girth of a small tree.

Barbs budded along his length, ugly and eager. He gave the order and the bison surged forward.

Branches snapped. Leaves flew. The forest became a tunnel of green and panic.

Breath tempering cultivators clung to Radeon like drowning men.

Hands and arms locking around him as the bison rammed through them and over them.

For a moment they thought they had hold of something solid.

Then Radeon drank. Flesh went first, then bone. Even the soul came loose in thin, shrieking threads that no one else could hear.

Bodies dried in seconds, skin tightening to parchment, eyes collapsing into dark pits

They slid off in heaps as the bison thundered on, and the only mercy was how quickly it was done.

Fay shut her eyes when the killing turned into routine. It was not that she loathed it.

She simply did not feast on it the way Radeon did, did not take pleasure in murder as if it were a craft.

Her mouth stayed set. Her hands clenched in the bison's mane.

Fay let the thunder of hooves and the thin screams pass around her, like the winter wind they were riding on.

Radeon knew what ran through her head. He could almost taste it in the way her shoulders drew up.

She had been raised under sect roofs and warded courtyards. Sheltered. Kept clean.

He did not expect her to swallow thievery on the first day, then arson on the next.

If he forced her into it, he would only twist her into something brittle and wrong.

There was a shape he needed her to grow into, and it would not be hammered out in panic and shame.

'Time to run it again.'

Radeon stretched himself to span ten meters from end to end, thickening and hardening as he wrapped along the bison's horns.

He became a more terrible instrument, a living brace and blade that turned the beast into a battering ram.

Bandits scattered and broke beneath the charges. Arrows hissed down in black streaks.

Radeon slipped between them, guiding the bison with fine, practiced control, maneuvering it like a machine that answered thought.

After the tenth plunge through the trees and bodies, the bison's breath came out in steaming bursts.

Radeon probed the creature's core and felt it nearing the bottom, qi sloshing thin like a cup scraped clean.

He had only blood pills on him. For cultivators they were a potent tonic that restored vitality.

For beasts, even one pill was a powerful stimulant. It drove them past caution and into frenzy.

Radeon fed the bison three. The first roar tore out of the creature like something reborn.

The bellow boomed through the snow and the pines, too loud for a mere herbivore, too sharp for a creature that once grazed and fled.

Radeon let it go. Its hooves turned crimson as it burned vitality like kindling. Jagged stones shattered under the charge. Men did too.

Radeon expanded again, twenty meters now, and caught bandits by the dozen as the bison drove through them.

The beast's intent did not waver. It wanted more. It wanted everything.

So the bandits changed. They formed up in groups, hands moving in hurried patterns, voices snapping out crude commands.

Lines of force linked one man's weight to the next.

Masses of Earth Array, the kind used to stop a charging beast by turning the ground into a shared anchor.

Dirt and stone answered them, thickening underfoot, rooting their stance.

Too bad their enemy was not only the bison.

Radeon did not smash headlong into the array. He circled instead, drawing the bison around and around the gathering knot of men.

Bandits shouted at each other, shoving and dragging stragglers into place.

Tens became a hundred. Even the looters came scrambling in, desperate to hide behind the only wall they could make.

The circle tightened. Radeon swam around it like a dolphin around a school of sardines, patient and hungry, waiting for the moment they broke.

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