"That kid sure is a handful," the ancient murderer mused in silence.

Ebon Dirge allowed his spiritual awareness to billow out over the landscape of the forest, scanning the surroundings and skimming over the forest's surface without penetrating the ground too deeply. To do that was to invite a possible backlash, after all.

He wondered if any of the locals had any idea that their mysterious Primeval Forest was itself a lifeform, a creature born from heaven and earth. Possessing its own spirituality but still lacking in having much will, the forest unconsciously circulated essence. In other words, it was itself one giant cultivator.

Dirge had seen the like before. He knew how it would end up, unchecked. To reach a basic standard of immortality, such a being would need to sprawl thousands of times more vast than it currently was. As of right now, it could be considered the equal of a cultivator at the middle stages of Palace Construction, the realm following the congealing of the foundation. Right now, it slumbered, but once it had enough essence to undergo the birth of a Nascent Soul... then, it would obtain consciousness, and everything about it would change.

This would naturally be a catastrophe for the local inhabitants, but it was one in a distant future, by their reckoning of time. The forest had taken over a millennium to reach its current state, and in that time its presence had attracted a myriad of lifeforms, some already able to cultivate while others bathed in the ambient essence only knowing it made them feel stronger, better. As the forest evolved, the ones living in its interior would also see gains. Eventually, those within several thousand miles would be facing a forest with a mind of its own teeming with legions of mighty beasts capable of enacting its will to expand.

Or a passing cultivator of a higher realm could decide to obliterate it, or refine it into a treasure, or enslave it, whichever they felt like doing aligning with their abilities and their path.

Dirge considered the possibility of the boy reaching that realm and dismissed it. While the boy had a vicious streak and his vivid imagination was readily turned to inventive scheming, he also tended to respond too pliably to the smallest kindnesses. Paying evil unto evil and good unto good was a general maxim for most cultivators, but the boy indulged this practice to an extreme level. Strong River was so starved of kindness that he consumed the slightest smile and let it cloud his vision.

Dirge was having an inkling now why the boy's visible destiny was a weak, flickering lamp rather than a steady light. He would likely overcome his present station and go far for someone with his background, but he would burn out long before he reached the construction of his Essence Palace, let alone further down the path.

It made little difference to him whether the boy exploded while trying to build his foundation or soared straight into the Immortal Realms, the boy was a first step, a project in observation. He would allow the boy to grow, fertilize him, water him. And then, when the time was right, Dirge would harvest his due and leave to find another touched by destiny.

While the forest would not be used to its full potential by this boy, it still was an excellent resource. Ample essence, abundant wildlife with powerful energy roiling through their bloodstreams... this place was a paradise for a low stage cultivator starting out with the Blood Devouring Palm.

The boy would need months here, maybe even years, though. Not a mere couple days as he was now arranging.

The boy was finding security within the clan. Complacency. Tales of immortal estates and divine treasures could stoke curiosity and thirst, but for a Strong River to whom a pot of stew was living in the lap of luxury, shunting all that to the back of his mind could happen all too easily with the addition of a few more creature comforts.

An idea then occurred to Dirge. Yes, it was time to check on a possible seedling and see if it had grown. Withdrawing his far-flung spiritual sense, his spirit body soared across the grasslands back to the Flowing Water clan. A trip that took a half of a day for the caravan was mere minutes, even in the current pitiful state that Dirge's soul was in.

As the new moon's faint shadow rose to herald in the witching hour, the immortal slaughterer's spirit was amused to see that he made an accurate assessment. Skulking through the compound towards its most destitute edge was a shrouded figure of a man bearing a dark lantern with its shutter open only a sliver. He approached the most wretched hovel in the clan with care, checking each way to ensure nobody else was watching. Elder Wave was wasting no time in trying to get to the bottom of things.

The elder scrambled inside the trashy hovel that Strong River called home, closing the door behind him. Opening the shutter on the lantern, he began to scramble through the refuse and junk that littered the interior. Dirge took a moment to employ an obscure soul technique, one that was generally useless given its need for the target to be far beneath its user in strength. Elder Wave's thoughts and emotions became available to him, as easily read as an open book's text.

The elder's emotions at the moment were a mixture of cautious excitement, hovering trepidation, and a bubbling of hope trickling in the corner of his thoughts. The brat had somehow found a way to advance enough to manhandle one of Soaring Wave's minions, and that sort of thing didn't happen overnight without something external going on.

Elder Wave hadn't kept extensive surveillance on the boy, but he had nonetheless had an eye on him for years. Even Dirge, bathed in blood and draped in the viscera of countless others, felt an immediate urge to shove away the reasoning for this, a rationale that had to do with a particular book the elder kept in a locked chest and some arrangements with the local bandits that included the use of a nearby cavern.

Regardless of the reasons why, the elder knew the boy's circumstances, and knew them well enough to understand that his transformation was a sudden thing, a thing that came from an external opportunity. Elder Wave had been stranded at the pinnacle of the Human Realm for decades now and had long since held out little hope for ascending to the level of chief himself, instead investing those hopes in his nephew. An opportunity, though, could change that.

Rummaging through the leavings of that boy, Elder Wave could find no opportunity. Had that brat taken it with him? Did he hide it somewhere? Was it, heavens forbid, already gone? Elder Wave had a deep pit form in his stomach at that thought.

For an hour he probed and prodded, examining every tattered rag and broken fork, even clawing at the dirt floor of the hovel to see if any of it had the softness of recent digging. Finally, disgusted, he clamped down the shutter on his lantern and left the shack, taking extreme care to check for any observers. He, of course, had no idea about the spectral observer watching from inside his very thoughts.

The elder's thoughts and emotions churned as he returned to his own comfortably appointed cabin. He lived alone -- his most direct servants had separate accommodations of their own -- and so nobody was there to notice his arrivals and departures. Irritated by his failure to find anything, he put the lantern out and away and threw himself into bed, a fluffy monstrosity that he blissfully sank into the mattress of. Not a man for late hours, despite his agitation he fell into a deep sleep.

And that's when Dirge went to work.

Skirting the man's usual dream fare, Dirge poked and prodded at his anxieties instead. What if he hadn't checked thoroughly enough? What if someone else goes later and finds it instead? Why was he so delicate with it, it was just some orphan's hovel after all. He was an elder of the clan, a pillar of the community, a decisive decider.

"Tear it all down... yes, tear the whole stupid thing down and sift through the pieces..." Elder Wave mumbled into his pillow.

And so passed the night. Sometime after dawn, Elder Wave woke up and had a sumptuous breakfast, eggs and bread and meats and fruits all piled on the table, only a tenth of them actually entering his mouth. Afterward, he gathered his servants and had them grab axes and shovels. He led them through the compound, axes and shovels slung over their shoulders in plain sight for all they passed to see and went to the shoddiest hovel of them all.

"Tear this thing down. Chop up the boards, dig up the flooring," he commanded. "Anybody who finds something interesting that isn't trash gets a month's bonus." So incentivized, the servants got to work with aplomb, each imagining himself what he could do with a month's bonus. Several nearby occupants gave the gaggle strange looks, but none worked up the courage to a say a thing.

As the boards approached the state of mulch and the floor approached the state of a pit, Elder Ripple with a retinue of his own in tow approached the site of the dismantling. "Wave, are you out of your mind?" he almost bellowed.

Elder Wave was somewhat grumpy at the moment, his most brilliant idea having produced nothing but a mulchy dirt hole in the end. "I don't see that it's any of your concern, Ripple," he announced airily.

"None of my concern? You just up and dismantled the home of a member of the clan, and I'm not supposed to be concerned, Wave?" Elder Ripple was beside himself with incredulity.

"He's an orphan. It was a crappy shack anyway." Elder Wave replied, shrugging off Elder Ripple's indignation.

"And where's he going to live now, then? You going to drive him out into the wilderness?" Elder Ripple may or may not have been as scandalized as he presented, but he was holding onto this like a dog onto a side of meat.

At the word "wilderness" Dirge gave his temporary occupant a mental nudge, a lighting of fireworks signaling another brilliant idea. Elder Wave's eyes brightened considerably, but then he composed himself and replied. "Of course not, don't be daft. The boy is a warrior now, he'll need a warrior's house. This thing was a thorough eyesore. I'm doing him a favor. It's not like he would have left anything worth keeping anyway."

Elder Ripple gave Elder Wave a narrow-eyed glare. "This is ill done, Wave. This won't be the last of this, mark my words." Elder Ripple left as quickly as he arrived.

Elder Wave blew out a relieved sigh. "We're all done, men. Go back to the house and have yourselves a meal. I'll be out for the afternoon." The men, pleased by the uncharacteristic surge of generosity, rushed away as a group.

Elder Wave watched them leave and then carefully, circuitously left the compound on foot. Of course the boy's opportunity was out in the grass, the brat came out here to mope, that's where he had to have found it!

Dirge toyed with the man's sense of direction, giving him alternating pangs of disappointment and hope that led him in a specific path. Eventually, far from the beaten tracks, Elder Wave approached a small pond in the field, one of many little reservoirs that came and went as the region's water table balanced itself. In front of the pond was a corpse, a man dressed in the mismatched garb of a bandit with a smashed face and a slit wrist.

Bending to examine the body, Elder Wave noticed that it had been stripped of small valuables but was otherwise intact. The body was miraculously untouched by the wildlife, but the elder noticed it was utterly drained of blood, presumably having been bled out via the cut on its wrist. Looking around, he saw broken stalks of grass showing where a struggle had occurred. Following more bent grass, he then discovered a second body of a similarly attired bandit. This one was even more bizarre: it was completely drained of blood to the point of being a husk, all without any clear wound.

No predator that Elder Wave knew of hunted like this. Nor would they have left desiccated husks instead of devouring the meat. While the second body was too withered to make anything of a time of death, the first was still intact enough to make some guesses about when he died.

Elder Wave did some quick math on his fingers. Go back to the meeting a couple days, which had been held because the boy had shut himself in for a few days... and right before the seclusion could've been the right time for this to have happened. Oddly enough, bizarrely enough, the boy had to be linked to this!

The boy did have a secret! It was on his body! Now Elder Wave would have to wait for the brat to return from the trip, to get a little comfortable, and then he could take it for himself. But what was it? Whatever it was, it seemed to be able to steal the life essence from living beings to supplement one's own cultivation. What a treasure! With this, he could break through his shackles and enter the realm of essence! The Chief, Elder Ripple and all the others would be crushed beneath his heel! Ripple's little brat nephew, the one with the pretty blue eyes--

Dirge broke off contact with Elder Wave's thoughts at that moment, somewhat regretting the lack of a physical body to cleanse in a bath. The seeds were sown, his task here was done. Pleased with this adjustment to the kid's future path, the immortal killer's soul soared over the grasslands lit by the noontime sun, eager to check in on his would-be student.