The second day starts much more smoothly than the last, as we began to get in a rhythm, getting our groupwork and cohesion fleshed out, along with series of lucky encounters. We encountered a pair of steel haired boar early in the morning. I had divided my guards up into two groups, with a couple split off from each group to act as bait for the charge. Once the boars charged, they would sidestep, bring out their shields, and do a shield bash to knock the boar off its feet. The remainder of the group would pounce on it, secure the tusks to the floor, and use their swords to pierce the stomach rapidly. Using this method we managed to secure some decent QI infused boar meat for dinner, and I did not have to use Qi on making a poor formation.

The second spirit was more difficult, but luckily one my simple formations that I knew was perfect for the job, reducing what would have been a deadly ambush into a manageable fight. We encountered an ironwood snake, its wooden scales have the strength of steel, which do well to prevents thrusts and slashes using unempowered weapons to penetrate its scales. Meanwhile the woody nature of its scales made them highly resistant to blunt weapon strikes. I had the guards collectively perform a shield bash on the giant snake’s head, knock it aside long enough for me to channel a fireball formation, managing to get this one off much faster than yesterday. Just the impact of the fireball was enough to force the snake back down when it managed to recover from the synchronized shield bash, but that was not the end of it. The fire from the formation catching the head on fire, immediately causing the snake to flail. This caused a couple minor injuries, but nothing worse than a bruised ego, before the flames managed to kill it in short order.

Thinking this would do well to sell for light armor, we pause for the afternoon, allowing some guards and the merchants to cut away some of the snakeskin to sell. While they were working on the snakeskin, I used the hour or so of rest to get some more reading in, nearly finish reading through all the documents I needed for my assignment. I briefly nodded off at the end of the break, the reading and the earlier days tiring me out. This turns out to be beneficial to me as that slight bit of sleep was enough to prompt a couple of notifications.

[Path of the Young Master Rank Six]

[Path of Formations has been obtained]

[Path of Formations Rank 1]

[Technique: Rapid Channeling obtained]

When I nod awake, I do a little “yes” fist pump, as the new Technique and Path I got likely makes formations a semi-viable option in battles. We get going once again, and when we come by a small pack of weak fox spirit beasts, I use my new [Rapid Channeling] to send off two fireballs in the same time it had previously taken me to get one formation done. When Duanlu looked at me skeptically, I mention how the accidental nap I had gained me the Formations Path and a passive Technique that sped up my channeling of Qi into the formations. They give a brief congratulations about the new Path before we set off again.

We had a few hours of relatively peaceful travels as nothing really attacked us. Not to say we saw no spirit beasts, as a couple lightning deer had walked out of the forested edge of our path, only to scamper away as they saw the size of our caravan, not wanting to deal with danger we posed. During this time I managed to finish all the reading I needed to do to determine the their subject matter. I began debating on how I should organize things. A good half of the documents could fit into a bunch of different groups, but honestly would only be kept so that they could be referenced for rare instances. The other half of the documents I could see needing to be pulled out and referenced anywhere from weekly to monthly. Seeing an easy way to slim down on searches for common documents, I decide to place a big divider in the middle of the documents, splitting the rarely referenced documents from the ones that would be regularly referenced.

Using this organizational breakdown, I further sorted the regularly referenced items into a handful of smaller categories based on their subject matter. I primarily did this so that there were fewer frequently referenced documents in each section, but still a fairly common denominator among everything in a section. Within each section I just ordered documents by frequently referenced documents, the ones being pulled out weekly, in front, and the less frequent ones in the back. This would allow anyone who needed to grab something quickly managing to do it within ten seconds.

The rarely referenced stuff was harder to sort, as I couldn’t even figure out if anything would be referenced once in a year, only that the documents contained at least something important in them that might need to be kept for the rare circumstance it was needed. I ended up deciding one of the categories would be land leases, as I noticed a handful of old land leases, that while no longer the current ones being used, as they had been either sold and rebought later, or enough changes to the land and structures had occurred, resulting in updated ones being issued. Normally documents like these would be thrown away, but these seemed to be for ancestral and important lands. Using this as a basis, I noticed a decent pile of old resource yield reports, noting that each of them seemed to contain a few exceptional values in them. Deciding these reports likely contained record yields, I allocated another category to them. That simple group turned out to be documents pertaining to the family tree, whether they were marriage contracts, adoptions, birth forms, or formal recognitions of someone being removed from the family.

The last handful of documents seemed to have nothing tying them together, and honestly nothing about them seemed that important. Deciding I would leave them as a dreaded miscellaneous category for now, with the promise I would review them one last time tomorrow before we arrive at the city.

This turned out to be a good stopping point, as the guards began muttering, saying they kept seeing the one tailed spirit foxes on the edge of the forest, which normally wasn’t a cause to worry, but they usually attacked in small groups. A few hundred feet later, I finally saw why they hadn’t attacked yet, as I was pretty sure I saw a second tail behind slightly larger fox.