As Lung went downstairs to get his set of knives, Heng did as he had been instructed:

  He took the body of the rooster, which they had hanged upside-down to bleed out, unhooked it and put it on a table he had just cleaned, the only one in the kitchen that was both big enough and easy to clean up afterwards.

  The adrenaline from the night had left his heart, and doubt over his actions was creeping in.

  Old Man Ling had a laboratory where he did this kind of thing, but he had never got to see it. He didn't know exactly what he had studied there, but from what he had been told, the room had been abandoned for years anyway; he simply had no reason to study anything but the soul anymore.

  And he had accepted it, gladly taking in what biological information had already been found, without ever entertaining the need for more.

  But these were new grounds.

  Humanity had studied Spirit Beasts, especially those altered by the Red Moon, for countless years; as Chang Jian would put it, they sought understanding of their enemies and learned how to best destroy them.

  His ancestor had done it to better his craft, and now he'd do the same, with a sample like none others had ever seen in that small city.

  He should've been ecstatic, thrilled even, but all he felt was… guilt.

  He looked down and saw a needless death. A life taken early by a power it did not comprehend, after everything it was, its very living body, had been broken down into something it wasn't supposed to be.

  As he bathed in the weakness that hid under his newfound magic, he felt and saw the resemblance he carried with something as foul as a beast. And he now would treat it as a curiosity. A tool.

  But no matter the guilt, curiosity remained.

  He had dedicated almost ten years of his life to the art and had grown to love it a bit more every passing day, every little discovery igniting his heart like nothing else ever did. The creature was a well of untouched knowledge. If he went through, he’d receive answers to questions he had never even thought of asking. The betterment of humanity, adding weeks, months, Hell maybe even years to his lifespan…

  This is just an animal. Was. A damned, fucking animal, raised to breed and be eaten.

  He swallowed, his eyes wide open, but they saw blurry.

  And I compared myself to this? Ridiculous. I’m a human, I’m above such a mindless, idiotic creature. For the Nine Hells, I’m a Cultivator, I’m above humanity too! I deserve this. I fought off whatever this thing was supposed to be; I’ve refused the will of the Heavens by surviving their punishment!

  His voice came out distorted when he called out for Lung.

  “I’m ready here!”

  He did not acknowledge how false that was.

  First lesson: this world is not my friend, it’s just dangers and enemies. Second lesson… I can’t always follow what I feel is right, or I’ll be chewed and spit out for my weakness. Bend the knee, forget your morals, and you’ll find strength in your ruthlessness, the one you bring to others and to yourself.

  How melodramatic.

  His ruthless cousin had been recognised by the whole city for his power, his skill. Had exterminated invading beasts and saved lives thanks to it. People whispered his name in awe, worshipped the ground he walked. Xin was terrified of him. Dong Juren had brutally beaten a man who should have been able to snap him in half, made Heng run away like the lowest of cowards, and faced no consequences. Elder Rong did the same with the same result right in front of the City Lo- Uncle Peng.

  Melodramatic as it was, that was truth.

  As he listened to Lung explaining the various knives and their use, he took care to forget how many lies he was choosing to believe.

  “This thing spent already too many hours uncared, but at least the draining went well. You made me use more buckets than I’m comfortable with, but I’ll find something to do with it. We’ll start with removing the organs, by splitting it open from the base of the neck to whatever this thing had for a butthole.”

  He took a short knife, thick at the base with an extreme curve that soon led to the thin tip.

  “I’m not a butcher, so this is just how I do it, but for this part I start by cutting the hide and only then go for the meat- this skinning knife you can guess what is for.”

  The process began, and this time the boy had a hard time swallowing, even if almost no blood came out. The blade advanced slowly, and Lung grunted in annoyance.

  “This is not how a rooster should be. This is not skin, these are… scales? Makes me think of something else, like a snake, where did you even find this thing? I’ve seen things in my wife’s darkest book that don’t look this ugly.”

  “Told you, in an alley at night. A red light came right after the thunderstrikes, just like in the Red Moon, and it transformed.” The lie was smaller this time, and to someone other than himself, but still there.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Hm. Weird. But I guess it changing this soon means it had to be special in some way, and it explains the lack of feathers. Anyway, for this the usual skinning knife isn’t right- a heavier set will work better, and the cut will come easier if it comes from the inside. Watch.”

  He inserted the tip of a huge knife upside down from where he had stopped, and used the parts of the blade closest to the handle to slash it open, keeping the point always inside the flesh. The boy felt like throwing up, and the need grew even stronger when the man stopped halfway through and told him to finish this first part of the job.

  His trembling hands grabbed the handle. They were sweaty and cold, and it almost slipped from his grasp, but he forced himself to do it. The back of his throat was burning, and a horrible taste was waiting at the base of his tongue as he swallowed too much saliva.

  Only when he reached the lower part of the belly did he get a pleasant distraction: he had been forced to get closer to the body, and now felt a small dot of energy inside its guts, at the centre of mass.

  A smile blossomed on his face, as luck for once had worked in his favour.

  He worked as fast as he could, wanting to reach it as soon as possible, and stopped only when a big and soft hand blocked him.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to reach the actual hole and split open its intestines. You don’t wanna see the shit coming out-”

  That was the last drop that forced him to run upstairs to the bathroom and puke. His throat burned time and time again until his stomach was empty. When he was done, he sat down on the floor of the bathroom, ignoring the man who was calling him and making his mind wander in the right directions instead.

  With an effort of will, he left the memory of disgust in favour of wistful thinking- but darker emotions lurked too close to the edge not to notice them, but still tried to force them away. It didn’t work.

  …

  It took him more than he’d have liked to clean himself up and be back. He wasn’t in the perfect state of mind, but the pain of a retching stomach was familiar enough to calm him down; It had wasted enough meals over the years to make it almost a common experience, and the thought was weird enough to distract him as they finished this first task.

  One by one, they used a more generic, heavy-set meat knife to carve out the organs and put them aside. The boy’s curiosity settled completely on the heart: not only would the others become less and less important over time, but it was also tightly related to the development in the Second Awakening Stage. Taking good care of it was essential.

  “Amazing, this thing is huge.” He said as he held it in his blood-soaked hands. “I can’t see much, but it seems much more complex than that of a mortal. Lung, this has to be well conserved and taken good care of, and when I get to work on it, I’ll need some precision knives, these can’t do.”

  “Ugh…” The man grumbled, resting on a table as the boy took charge of handling the soft parts. “I still have some ice from the winter, downstairs, but you’ll have to wait a couple of days for the knives. I have a friend who will probably let us borrow them.”

  “That’s great, please bring this straight away to the ice.”

  Heng wrapped the hearth in paper and gave it to him; when he walked out of the kitchen, complaining once again, he was finally free to check the thing he had found in a small crevice between the stomach and the intestines:

  What almost looked like a small, round pearl the size of a pinky nail, perfectly smooth and filled with ever-shifting colours, as if the lights of dawn and sunset, a rainbow and a flowerfield had been gathered and were now swirling inside it.

  More than that, what was attracting him was the Qi it contained: pure like none other he had ever felt, superior to anything those lands could offer, the same as the night before; A Qi reminiscent of the Heavenly Tribulation, a natural force of destruction, but it was… restrained. What should have been a furious beast, a dragon raging against its bindings, had become nothing more than those beautiful lights.

  For the moment, the violence was hidden inside that small jewel. The Core of a Spirit Beast. Not a rarity, but this was different, for obvious reasons, both in how it looked and what mysterious potential the boy was sure it kept hidden.

  His mind raced to find something to compare it to, and after rushing through dozens of books he had read on the topic of Cores, he found one about those of beasts. He hadn’t particularly researched that one subject, so it was just a comparison of them with those of humans- The difference between men and beast, if he remembered correctly.

  He did not care to remember the author for sure, though: his methods of research had him imprisoned and later executed for heretic tendencies, human experimentation, and Cultivator homicide. Multiple, in fact.

  It was a miracle he had even found one copy before they were all burnt down.

  Beasts and humans cultivated in opposite ways: the former, from their bodies to the Core and Dantian, the latter, from their inner world to their mortal shells. It had many implications, but in this case, it simply meant that a Spirit Beast’s Core of this low level would be rough, unrefined, uneven, lacking in a clear element, and very, very small.

  That of a person would still be small, but not that much, and fairly smooth, with a faint elemental aura; other characteristics depended on natural talent, Cultivation technique, and other factors he still didn’t know.

  The one he was holding was far bigger than even that of a human, and far superior in quality, like that of a supreme genius. Which made no sense, since the monster clearly hadn’t been a prodigy of any kind, and had lacked in the bloodlines that would make a beast that talented.

  So, either the Heavens had created that perfect pearl as-is, which was boring, or they had immensely improved the one the rooster had naturally generated upon becoming a Spirit Beast.

  If that were the case, he would have to study it for a long time.

  He slipped the beautiful thing in his pocket and went back to his work as he heard Lung coming back from the basement.

  “The next step is to separate the legs and wings. For the meat and fat, a butcher knife works, tendons and ligaments, we’ll use a boning one instead. There should be no need for a bonesaw today-”

  “No, I should need it later, I need to see as many of the changes as possible, I can’t give up on something as important as bone structure and marrow.” Not as interesting as the Core and hearth, but still plenty fun. And much less disgusting than what I’ve gone through until now. “Don’t put it away when there’s so much more to see.”

  “You do realise we have the lunch frenzy to take care of, right?”

  “... Oh.”

  “Yeah. After the limbs, you clean up the kitchen. Can’t have my customers see the place where their food is made be covered in blood, can they?”

  “I… I guess.”

  To hell with cleaning right after. I’m gonna check so many things here, the customers will think I’m insane.