“I have trained as a herb boy. I have worked as a hospital orderly for a few months, learned a bit of diagnostic medicine, some basic medical theory, and as much first aid as I could in the time allowed. I have manuals on these subjects that I read very, very carefully.”

“Why are you telling me?” Hong Liren looked like she was doubting Tian’s mental health, which he felt was pretty rich coming from her.

“I’m not actually a doctor.”

“Nobody thinks you are. Did… did you think we thought that…”

“I can do first aid. I have first aid supplies and training. I study medical knowledge, but I am not a doctor. My job is to keep people alive until we can get them to a doctor. We are headed away from the doctors. And nobody seems to have a problem with this.”

“Of course they don’t. It isn’t actually a problem.” She blinked uncomprehendingly at Tian. He blinked uncomprehendingly straight back.

“I have nine bodies in my ring that prove it is a problem.”

“Go to Hell!”

“How do I understand this, Sister? How?”

“Because it’s their job! It’s my job, and your job and all our jobs. Everyone here is a volunteer. It’s not even a mandatory mission. I know you had to convince your seniors to let you take this mission. You don’t think other people have their reasons to be here? We do. We all do.”

“Ambushing merchants.”

“Commerce raiding.”

“I don’t know what that is.” Tian shrugged.

“It’s what Sister Rou called the mission.” Tian looked puzzled. “Sister Rou is the senior I have been traveling with. She was taking this mission anyway, and a senior on the Disciplinary Squad asked her to look out for me.”

Tian tried not to mind that none of the doctors had done the same for him, and failed.

“Alright, but I still don’t know what it means.”

“Commerce equals trade. Trade equals money. Money equals resources. No resources means you die. So no commerce equals death.”

“No it-”

“YES, JUNGLE RAT, IT DOES!” Hong exploded. “Do you have any idea what it costs to run your temple? Or my convent? And we are a rounding error on the balance sheet compared to even a single city block in the Inner Court. Everything costs money!”

“Doesn’t mean you die without stuff,” Tian muttered, being stubborn for the sake of it. “You know I can tell when you are just repeating something you heard, right?”

“You are the absolute last person in this entire wasteland who gets to make fun of me for that. The sand lice can complain before you, you parrot!”

“The commerce raiding is to make them poor and us rich, so they starve and we get stronger.” Tian decided to be, despite all available evidence, the bigger person. He couldn’t expect politeness from a girl even Brother Fu thought was a hooligan.

“Yes. Like the Martial Uncle said. Knocking out one convoy won’t do much at all. But if we keep doing it, eventually, Black Iron Gorge can’t fight anymore.”

Tian nodded. “That’s why the Monastery is here. I know why I’m here, and I can guess why you are here, but-”

“Money. The answer is money. The answer is always going to be money. Even for you- the reason your good brother died was money. Maybe he didn’t think it was, but it was. It’s why your seniors let you go on the mission. It’s cheaper to fix people out in the field with a Level Five orderly than a Level Nine actual doctor, never mind a Heavenly Person. And it’s cheaper to let you risk your life chasing vengeance than to try and cure your heart demon with pills. Money is why everything happens.” Hong’s hands were jerking around and her breathing was heavy. “Getting money and keeping it.”

Tian grunted. “Everyone would rather die than give up on the money.”

“Birds die for food, men for gold. Do you want me to say that it’s wrong?” She threw up her hands. “Fine. It’s wrong. It’s also how the world is, and if you don’t adapt, you die. So do you want to slit your own throat, or should I just stab you?”

He wanted to make a crack, but Hong was clearly hanging on to her temper with rapidly weakening fingers.

“Alright, it’s money and it’s how the world is. But why?” He flicked his eyes upwards.

“Money.”

“I’m being serious.”

“I am too. Do the math. You did learn your numbers in the jungle, didn’t you?”

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“Yes, as I played my jumping games.” Tian nodded seriously. “They are really fun.” Then he frowned, trying to figure out what Hong meant. Surely it was free for the senior to fly around on his sword, so why couldn’t he shuttle someone to the hospital? Could he physically not carry people on his sword? That was possible, but it also seemed like a solvable problem. Maybe some kind of flying stretcher or portable flying boat or something.

Tian squatted and started doodling in the dirt. They had gone a little way from camp, but privacy was more of an idea than an actual thing. It had been drummed into him that juniors did not openly speculate about their seniors, especially where the seniors can hear them. Who knows what that Martial Uncle could see and hear from wherever he was.

Do the math, it’s too expensive for him to move. Why? It looks like it should be free. So it’s not just the shuttling the wounded around thing. It was probably a Martial Uncle Ku thing, or an Inner Court thing. What did he know about the Inner Court and money?

Well, they were constantly adventuring. Their growth seemed tightly linked to it. So that made it sound like they also needed a lot of resources to grow, which sounds like money again. So the Martial Uncle would really want to loot this caravan. Every time he made a move he got a bigger share, though, so… ah. Ahaha. Yikes.

“Out of curiosity, how do the shares work if someone dies?”

“Not the way you are thinking. The dead person’s share goes to their family, and if they don’t have a family, to the Monastery.” She recited.

Alright, the Martial Uncle should have an interest in shuttling people to the hospital. It would increase his percentage of the loot due to his taking action, and letting people die provided no benefits. So why wasn’t he? Money again, but how? And how could it be worth more than increasing his share of the loot?

The doodling in the sand intensified. The Inner Court adventured to gather resources to grow. No resources meant death. If Hong believed that, then the Inner Court probably believed it. So… he didn’t go because the risk wasn’t worth the extra money. Getting ambushed by predatory animals and heretical cultivators was what usually happened when you moved through the Redstone Wastes. It happened to True Disciples too- he had seen them carried into the hospital often enough.

The answer was always money. The Lay Brothers and Sisters wouldn’t turn back, because they were all at the peak of level Nine and presumably needed stuff to keep their hopes up, or just for their own comfort and pleasure. The True Disciple wouldn’t turn back because of basically the same reason. In fact, the reason his rates went up every time he made a move was precisely that danger to value calculation. He had kept himself hidden virtually the whole trip. He must be hiding out from ambushes.

Most importantly, an Inner Sect disciple was worth dozens of Outer sect disciples here in the wasteland. Perhaps hundreds. A peak Level Nine Earthly Person fighter couldn’t survive even one move from a Level One Heavenly Person. From the Monastery’s perspective, risking Martial Uncle Ku to save Outer Sect disciples was downright reckless irresponsibility. Martial Uncle Ku’s willingness to make a move at all was presumably driven by his own good character and his belief that the Lay Brothers and Sisters would be needed for the ambush.

Inner Sect disciples cost a lot to raise, after all. What was it that Brother Su said? The actual ratio of Outer Court Lay Brothers and Sisters to Inner Court True Disciples, when looked at over a thousand years, was something like fifty to one. That was a lot of resources just to raise maybe one Heavenly Person. No wonder Brother Fu and Sister Bai were so cared for. The whole Monastery was saving a fortune thanks to their teaching methods.

“I think you have just drawn out a curse formation.” Hong observed.

“I think I have too. The answer is always money.”

“If only someone told you that twenty minutes ago.”

Tian nodded. “It would have been helpful, yes.”

Hong Liren nodded thoughtfully and rapped the butt of her spear gently on the sand. “I’m going to stab you once or twice. I think you have blood parasites attacking your brain, so really, this is a sort of healing for you. I am very kind.”

“No, I got rid of the parasites years ago. I’m much better now, thank you.”

“Wait, you actually had parasites?”

“I think so. I had a fungal infection in my lung that stopped me from breathing right until I was… ten, I guess? And my kidneys didn’t really work, but I don’t know why. And there was the cancer. Which isn’t a parasite, even if it acts like one sometimes. I took care of it though. All better now.”

“Why didn’t you go see a doctor?” She gave him a look. He looked straight back.

“I didn’t know what they were. And humans are rock throwers.”

The silence settled in around them. It got cold in the desert at night. The sky unfolded in glorious brilliance- the scattered gems of the stars paying court to the moon and the moon lending an ethereal glow to the desert sands below. Beautiful, but cold. Tian watched the sky a while longer, then smiled.

“The answer is always money. How stupid is that? The whole world is yours to take if you are strong enough. You can always take food from a tiger’s mouth if you are strong enough.” But he didn’t say it out loud.

They set off before dawn again. The ambush site was about a six hour hike from where they had camped. If everyone was fit, it might have only been four hours, but they weren’t, and it wasn’t worth rushing. The caravan was expected in the small hours of the night or early the next morning. Plenty of time to hide themselves well and make sure the ambush was as close to flawless as possible.

They reached what seemed like an arbitrary spot in the desert and the lead scout raised a fist to stop the patrol. Tian looked around, trying to see what they were seeing. He didn’t see it. Tian was plonked ten yards back from where the other Brothers and Sisters were setting up, and told to hide himself.

It was a flat, mostly empty, rocky stretch of nothing at all. “Endless places to hide,” Tian grumbled to himself. There really are endless places to hide. Hiding in plain sight was the name of the game in the wasteland.

If they knew where to set an ambush, it implies there is a road, or at least a regular route that caravans follow. So there is a reason they go through the same place over and over, even though that would set them up for ambushes. The answer is probably money again. Grandpa Jun chuckled. I told you way back- Land, Law, Money and People. All of which could be shortened to ‘resources, variously defined,’ if you were so inclined. For people who have cast off mundanity and shaken the red dust from their shoes, cultivators are rather worldly.

Tian couldn’t answer. He contented himself with digging a shallow trench and burying himself in it. He would get some meditation in while he waited. Level Five was progressing steadily. He was actually a little ahead of where he expected to be, just because he could pull in qi more efficiently in the wasteland now than he could before the Hell Suppressing Sutra.

I can’t tell you exactly what it was that happened to you when you got hit with that tooth. Well, I could, but you understand. You actually know enough to figure out a good chunk of it. Might as well spend your free time thinking about it. Who knows, it might happen again.

That, Tian thought, was the most sensible thing he had heard all day. He settled down to pick at the problem while he waited for merchants to deliver both money and their lives.