Farmer or Cultivator? Why not both?

The spies had soured Ren’s mood entirely. The grinding stress of waiting for war, the low-level violence that had become routine, the monotony of Tunish, all of it had been sitting on him for weeks, compressing slowly into something heavier than he could comfortably carry. But the spies were the final straw. He was done being patient about it. The merchants had made the mistake of continuing to underestimate him, and he intended to correct that impression properly, to make them genuinely afraid, afraid enough to leave him and his farm alone for good. That was a matter he would attend to when the time was right. For now, something else occupied his mind.

It had been a month and nine days since the messenger had blown his horn in the market square and changed the atmosphere of Tunish in an instant. War, for all the dread it carried when it first arrived, had a peculiar effect on people when it stalled. They began to forget it. Life crept back in around the edges, quietly and without announcement, filling the spaces that fear had briefly emptied. The bandit raids on distant cities and towns continued to grow in frequency, which suggested that Combec was reluctant to pour forces directly across the border. They preferred the quieter approach, sabotage and slow attrition over open confrontation. Bold enough to be noticed, cautious enough to avoid the full weight of retaliation.

Even the soldiers stationed in Tunish had grown restless and bored in roughly equal measure. The early weeks had been the worst of it, when they were wound tight and looking for outlets. Sleeping with widows could only hold a man’s interest for so long before even that lost its appeal. Eldrad had responded to the creeping tension by gathering the villagers in the square each evening, where he shared stories and old mythos about the gods and legendary figures, many of which the villagers had never heard before. It was a simple thing, and it worked better than anyone had expected. The shared gasps and bursts of laughter around the fire had done something real for the village, had reminded people that they were still people, still neighbors, still bound to one another by something more durable than fear. Even the soldiers had drifted over one evening and then returned the next, and with each passing night they had grown noticeably less aggressive, as though the stories had quietly reminded them that living among people required at least some effort to behave like one.

The weight of imminent death had loosened its grip. Villagers were no longer reluctant to step outside their doors. Most had begun to quietly believe that the war might not come to them at all, that it would exhaust itself somewhere out there, far beyond Tunish. Eldrad believed this. Tuarine had told Ren and Rokku as much during one of their evening meals outside, wearing a cautious optimism she would not have allowed herself a month earlier. It was a fragile thing, optimism in wartime, easily broken, but it was necessary. Without it a person had very little to stand on.

Throughout all of this, a different current had been running beneath everything else in Ren’s mind, constant and insistent. Many had already left the village. Erigald had sent his daughter to the capital, the one place he had feared would treat her poorly for what she was, because in the event of a real war it would be the safest place in the nation and no other consideration outweighed that. Those who remained were people who could not picture themselves living anywhere else, people who had made a quiet and private peace with the idea that if the end came it would find them in their own homes, in familiar soil. Ren understood that. He even respected it deeply. But he was not one of them, and he had known that for some time.

He wanted to leave. Every time he looked at Evo’s letter, the feeling returned with fresh and restless urgency, as though the letter itself were reminding him of something he already knew and kept choosing to defer. He needed to move. He needed a greater teacher, a real challenge, a path that was simply not going to be found behind a market stall in a small border village, however much he had come to care for the place and its people. However much he would miss it when he was gone.

He told Rokku plainly, sitting outside the house as the evening came in quiet around them. He explained the full shape of it, including the part the spirit animal may not have fully understood: that bringing Rokku to the market, teaching him to sell, introducing him to the villagers and to Onova, all of it had been deliberate. It had always been preparation.

"I need you to protect everything I have built here. The stall, the farm, the animals. Onova will help you with the people, but the harder things will fall to you. If it were not for you, I could not make this decision at all. Your evolution was a great blessing to me, Rokku, more than I have probably said."

Something shifted in the spirit animal’s face. It was barely perceptible, the faintest softening around an expression that was constitutionally stern, but Ren had spent enough time with Rokku to recognize it.

"I will honor your wish and take the best care of your home, Master Ren."

Ren nodded slowly. "And as a gift, the Tome of Mahābodhivān is yours to keep."

Rokku bowed low and held it.

The tome was far too large and heavy to carry on a long road, and if Ren were honest with himself, Rokku had always been the more devoted reader. The spirit animal had absorbed its pages with a genuine hunger that Ren had admired without quite matching. Without the tome, Rokku would have no guidance on cultivation at all, no framework for understanding what was happening to him as he grew stronger. It belonged with him. Ren had not yet reached certain sections, and there were things inside them he might have learned from, but he was confident that where he was headed would teach him what he needed. The road ahead would have to be his book.

He packed with care and deliberateness. Some bottles of blue milk. Dried vegetables. Berries. A handful of herbs wrapped in cloth. He lifted his silversteel sword and slid it into the scabbard on his back, feeling the familiar weight of it settle. He picked up the shotgun next and held it for a long moment, turning it over in his hands. He loved the weapon, had loved it since the day he had first fired it and felt the gap it represented between him and everyone around him. But he was close to the last of his ammunition, and no one in Enesh made bullets. He set it down and left it. Carrying a weapon he could not use was just weight.

"Too bad you will not have a sparring partner once I leave," he said, glancing at Rokku. "I still lead in wins, for the record."

"Tuarine will be my partner once you go," Rokku replied.

Ren’s shoulders dropped slightly. He looked at the spirit animal for a moment and said nothing. Rokku still had his particular blind spots when it came to reading the texture of human moments. It was forgivable. He was not a person and had never claimed to be.

"Yes," Ren said at last. "She will be. She might even prefer it." He managed a faint smirk.

He stood and turned to the fountain of elaxis. It sat where it always had, small and unassuming, easy to overlook if you did not know what it was. But Ren knew. It was the single most valuable thing he had found since arriving in this world, more valuable than the sword, more valuable than any skill or favor point or quest reward. He hated leaving it behind with a quiet intensity he had not fully admitted to himself until now. He took out a small wooden bottle from his pack, filled it carefully from the fountain, lifted it and drank a long, slow pull that moved through him like cold light, leaving him feeling sharp and clean and entirely awake. He filled it again and stopped it tight.

He looked at Rokku.

"No one drinks from this. Not the villagers, not the soldiers, not anyone who comes asking questions about it. Avoid those questions entirely if you can, and if you cannot avoid them, give nothing away. And if anything or anyone threatens damage to it, do not hesitate." He paused. "Kill if you must. This fountain stays exactly as it is. That is not a request."

It was perhaps the first time he had ever given Rokku a command with that particular weight behind it, the weight of someone who had thought carefully about what they were saying and meant every word of it without reservation. Rokku bowed deeply and held the bow for a moment longer than usual.

It was time to go.

Ren came down from the mountain and walked into the village. It was genuinely good to see people outside and moving about with something approaching ease. Children ran between the huts. Women called across the lane to one another. A modest level of trade was happening in the square, nothing like it had been before the announcement, but real. He smiled at the children who looked up at him as he passed, and noticed them glancing past his shoulder, searching for the large feathered presence that usually accompanied him.

That is really who they want to see. He smirked to himself and kept walking.

The women at their stalls called out warm greetings as he passed and he answered each of them by name. The soldiers along the road watched him with their customary suspicion, though they kept their distance. One peeled away from a wall and followed him for a stretch, then stopped when he turned toward Eldrad’s home. The old chief’s face appeared in the doorway almost immediately, eyes brightening at the sight of him.

"Well, come on in then."

"No, Eldrad. I have come to leave a parting message."

The brightness left the old man’s face as cleanly as a lamp being extinguished. His expression dropped, and for a moment he looked every one of his years.

"A parting message?"

"I am leaving."

A long pause. "Where to? Are you running from the war like the others? I did not think you of all people would do something like that."

"It is not that." Ren kept his voice steady. "I am beginning to think the war may never truly reach us, and if I wait for it to resolve itself before I move, I could wait forever. I had always planned to leave this village. I have spent enough time here. There are things I need to do that cannot be done from Tunish."

Eldrad looked at him with the particular expression of a man who understood something and wished he did not. Of all the people in the village, Eldrad had been the most generous to Ren from the very beginning. He had seen something in the summoned young man that he believed was connected to the divine, and he had harbored a private and unspoken hope that having Ren among them might turn the eye of the gods toward Tunish and steer the worst of what was coming elsewhere. The gods worked that way in the old stories. Sacred things drew protection. But the sacred thing was leaving.

"Inform Tuarine for me," Ren said quietly. "Tell her I am sorry."

"I will do no such thing," Eldrad said. He turned and walked back inside without another word, leaving the door wide open.

Tuarine was standing in the middle of the room.

She had heard everything. Her eyes were wide opened. They had only recently found their way to something real between them, a friendship built through shared sweat and shared meals and the particular intimacy of people who had trained hard together and trusted each other to hold back just enough. It had taken longer than it should have. And now this.

Ren looked away first. He did not want to see the hurt find its full shape in her face. He reached for the memory of the Tuarine he had first known, cold and self-contained and indifferent, the version of her who would have received this news with flat eyes and a shrug.

She would not care too much. He told himself.

She would not care.

She walked toward him slowly at first, and then she moved fast. Her left arm hooked his head and pulled it firmly down beneath her shoulder, locking it against her flank, while her right arm wrapped tight and hard around his abdomen, the hold closing with the precision of someone who had drilled it ten thousand times.

The belly burst. One of the most difficult holds in the Junjun system to break cleanly, which was exactly why practitioners of the art were trained from the beginning never to allow their head to be taken. She was not going easy on him. He felt his lungs compress immediately.

"I cannot breathe," he forced out, the words arriving in pieces.

"You cannot leave if you are unconscious," Tuarine answered. Her grip tightened another degree. She meant it.

He understood then that she genuinely intended to put him down. She was weaker than a cultivator in raw terms, but she had years and mastery and technique, and she had positioned herself perfectly. His vision began to go soft at the edges. The ground felt uncertain beneath him. His eyes were pulling closed against his will.

"No." The word came from somewhere below thought. His mana rose through him in a sudden flood, hot and sharp and absolute, and he drove both hands outward against her grip and broke it open. He seized her hands, holding them hard, and looked at her. She had the wide, still expression of something that had been caught. He released her and stepped back, and she dropped onto her back.

"I am sorry," he said, and turned away.

The brief struggle had gathered an audience. People had stopped in the lane outside, drawn by the sound of it, and they stood watching in silence. Most of them understood now that Ren was leaving. There was nothing to say to that. They watched.

He had taken a few steps into the lane when warmth pressed against his back. His feet stopped on their own.

"Tuarine—"

She was taller than him. When he turned she was already close, and she took his face in both hands and kissed him before he could find any words, and he did not pull away.

When she drew back her eyes were wet at the corners.

"Tell me you will return."

He had spent weeks carefully insisting to himself that what he felt for her was simply friendship, that the warmth was ordinary, that it did not mean anything particular. Looking at her now, he could see clearly that he had not been fully honest about any of that.

"I will return," he said, and the sad smile that came with the words was entirely real.