Medin was a tenacious woman. That was what people said about her.

  She’d have to be tenacious to be with a man like Chin. She had to be strong and hardy and able to tie him down when he wanted to get back up.

  The truth was, Medin was indulgent. She was just as bad as Chin in her own way. He was the stubborn farmer and she was the stubborn cook.

  She punched into the dough with rolled-up sleeves. It felt like a thin fabric, but it was twice the size of the largest pile of dough she had ever kneaded. It would be impractical for any person, man or woman, to make something this big without a handful of other people to help them.

  But Medin handled it with absolute ease. The dough fought back, but she conquered it through and through.

  “You know most people would go fight a bear or a lion after entering the first rank,” Rin Wi spoke from the corner. “But all you’ve done is cook.”

  “What good would a bear do? Leave the hunting to the hunters. Now if you could catch a bear and butcher it, and bring me a few alchemical mixes to make sure I can get all the parasites out in a stew, then that would be interesting.”

  Rin Wi shook her head lightly.

  Yes, she was just as bad as Chin. She was a cook, a mother, a person who cared and Chin was the same in his own farming way.

  Medin was tussling with the dough in one of the kitchen rooms that had been especially full for this time of year, but most of the cooking was going on outside. A group of about a hundred village cooks were all getting together and making as much food as they could, but even then that wouldn’t be enough.

  Not for this year.

  “Here’s one more batch!” A man yelled and just ten or so paces away dropped a pile of corpses.

  They were wild beast corpses, not human. Qi beasts of the first rank could grow to be the size of a small house depending on their species.

  “Thank you, Master Rou!” Medin yelled.

  She would have called him Master Xin but both Rou and Chin had warned her against using his last name so publically. He was apparently a cultivator of the fourth rank and Master Barlo had been hunting for qi beasts in the area just out of the Great Desert Strip.

  The idea seemed insane to her, even as she sat here at the third step of the first rank. The divide between the village, or Oasis City as people had started to call it, and the outer ends of the Great Desert Strip was tremendous. It was three thousand miles of pure burning heat and it would take any mortal months to cross on foot, provided they didn’t die of heat exhaustion first.

  The village only communicated with the other side of the strip via the Light Towers, or occasionally by sending out a messenger on a fast-riding qi beast. And even that would take them days to get across and days to get back. They had to be specially trained for that sort of journey.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Yet these two men, Rou Xin and Barlo Hew would leap across the desert in mere minutes, slaughter any number of beasts they found, and deliver them in spacial treasures within the hour.

  They were strange folk. They had both appeared after the monks had fought in the desert and at first, Medin had thought that they would be gone within the day, but for some reason, both decided to stay.

  And while Chin wasn’t friendly with cultivators, he had allowed them to stay, as long as they helped. And by the Heavens did they help.

  There was a small tremor as the pile of meat thumped and shook the ground beneath it. Medin felt the shaking in her ribs and all of the cooking staff looked up in bright astonishment.

  The last time they had gone out, it had been for rice. Each had been given one-fourth rank spirit stone and they had left the village and came back with enough rice to feed the village fifty times over. The next time was the same but for spices and, that had gotten everyone sneezing for a week.

  This time it was meat, and they had taken the spirit stone but chose to hunt for the meat instead.

  Both men stood on swords high in the sky.

  One wore a bamboo hat and had the elegance of a king but the clothes of a vagabond. He was tall with silk-white hair that reached just the end of his ears. His skin was a tanned bronze and his eyes carried a golden hue that screamed something of royalty.

  The other was his opposite.

  He had a small and nasty grin, one that made you hold your money pouch hard and hold your loved ones a little harder when you passed him. He had black hair and pitch-black teeth. To Medin, it felt like the blackest thing she had ever seen. His tongue shared the strange discoloration, and his pupils could not be separated from his iris. His nails too were a shade of midnight, and Medin firmly believed that he did not paint or alter them in any way.

  But his clothes were rich and green and the black of his teeth seemed to make his pale skin shine all the brighter.

  “I’ve given them a light poison Medin, one that will kill all the parasites. Just make sure to cook them well over a fire and they should be good for consumption,” Rou Xin said with a flash of his dark teeth.

  “Thank you, Master Rou!” Medin shouted.

  Rin Wi then raised her blade and cut. The knife she used was a cleaver, one of the old ones Medin had given her. It was a good knife, if a bit worn down but in Rin Wi’s hands, it seemed to shine with an eternal sharpness.

  A thin line appeared from Rin Wi’s cut and traversed through both air and people, ignoring both till it collided with the pile of meat. Skin, bones, organs, muscles, and fat flew into the air, each in their own pile.

  Rin Wi’s hands flashed and pans the size of tables appeared beneath the floating piles. Her hands moved and pulled and a crimson-red essence left the beasts, gathering at her fingertip. In seconds a red pearl was in her hands containing all the blood and energy of the qi beasts.

  Then, she cut again and the piece of organ, flesh, fat, and bones split into smaller pieces, and the hundreds of qi beasts were reduced to nothing but common meat.

  “Alright! Stop gawking and start cooking! I need the bones in a broth and the meats separate into cuts. We won’t serve anything rare so if they ask for it tell them they can hunt and kill their own food and maybe we’ll cook it for them! The dough’s ready so lets cook the meat for the pies first and do steaks for dinner, alright!”

  “Yes, Mistress Medin!” The voices echoed.

  Medin nodded and started heading for the meat.

  She had taught most of the people here how to cook, clean, sow, and keep their houses in order. She was a midwife, a seamstress, a mother.

  But most of all, she was a caretaker.

  She took care of people the best way she knew how. Her husband toiled away in the field and she toiled away in the kitchen. He harvested as much as he could because he could trust that Medin wouldn’t let a single ounce of it go to waste.

  Her village was alive and her people were full, and now, it seemed like they might be growing.

  She smiled, like a mother who was reminiscing on how big her children had grown.

  Yes, she was just like her husband and she wouldn’t have it any other way.