“I need a ranged weapon, Sister Li, so I thought I would come to you.”

“How ranged?”

Tian blinked. “I don’t think I understand, Senior Sister.”

“How much range do you need? A few yards? A few miles?” Sister Li spun her hand, clearly wanting Tian to get on with things.

“Well… I don’t think I could use anything that shot for miles.”

“You could. We can make siege weapons if you want. Costs a fortune, but a little bird tells me you have been commerce raiding.”

“I got in last night. How?” Tian didn’t say it though. The gossiping powers of the Level Nines had become an unshakable legend in his heart.

“I didn’t make that much. Or use that much. I don’t really want to learn how to use a bow.” Bows were, to Tian, a sort of machinery. Once he found out that bits of bows were often held in place with glue, he firmly discarded them as something he wanted to rely on. It might be irrational, but he had a secret conviction that bows would fall apart at the worst possible moment, leaving him vulnerable to the enemy.

He wanted something simple. Direct. No moving parts. Ideally, no parts at all. Just violence. Tian groped for the right words to express what he felt fighting Hong Liren. “I need something more yang.”

“Yang.”

“Yes. I’m being less… Sister Li, I really don’t know how to explain it. I just think the way I fight is yin. Too flexible, too soft, too complicated. I need something direct, simple, hard, and with high penetrating power. Something Yang.”

“I guess you are that age, huh?” Sister Li muttered. “You seem like you are hitting a growth spurt.”

“Sorry?”

“More yang than a bow. Somehow. And yet, not the weirdest request I got this month. Let’s see…” Sister Li tapped her lip.

“Darts or javelins. Same concept, different sizes- a pointy stick you throw at people. Darts are small, fast, classified as hidden weapons. As is your rope dart, actually. Note the word ‘dart’ in the name. Throwing darts are much, much smaller and lighter than what’s on the end of your rope. They tend to be more of a distraction or disabling weapon, though they can be fatal if used well.” She measured out a section of air roughly as long as her hand and as wide as her pinky to give him the general idea.

“Javelins are very fatal, but need a lot more room to work with. You need space to wind up and throw. You can think of them as having a minimum range to be effective. On the other hand, anything inside that range you can just stab with the javelin, so it’s not really a problem.” Sister Li shrugged one shoulder. For a crafter, they were both pretty dull choices.

Tian dumped out his half of the collected needles from the caterpillar on a reasonably flat stack of cloth. “Could these be turned into darts or javelins?”

Sister Li looked at them carefully. “Thin, three feet long, flexible, sharp, almost completely transparent… no, that’s not quite it…” She picked up a pair of long tweezers and carefully lifted a single needle. She brought it to her work bench and examined it under the bright lights. “Not just very transparent, it’s highly refractive. It’s bending the light around it, is what that means Junior.”She looked back at the pile of long hairs, running a scarred finger gently over them.

“If it was up to me, these would be special use arrows. Valuable to the right buyer. You could sell the hairs for a decent chunk of money to the quartermasters. These are probably unique so they won’t give you the price they really deserve. Unique doesn’t necessarily mean useful, after all. Still, just about any of us crafters would buy them from you. But if you want to have a weapon instead of spirit crystals, I can turn them into darts for you. How many of these hairs do you have?”

“About a hundred.”

“How about this- I’ll make you ten darts. These hairs will be the core material and I will add the rest out of my own supplies. Each dart will probably use between three and five hairs after processing. Anything I don’t use on your dart, I take as my payment for the materials and labor.”

“Deal.”

She gave him a surprised look, then shook her head. “These aren’t worth a fortune, but there is a good market for them. Junior Brother Tian, never accept the first offer you hear. It might be the best one you get, or it might be a scam. Always shop around.”

“That makes sense, Senior Sister.”

“Good here-”

“No, I want you to do the work please. On the terms you suggested.”

“Junior Tian-”

“I don’t want to live in a world where everything is always about money, Senior Sister. It might be, but it’s not the world I want to live in. I will have to kill some people I should never have had to guard myself against because that’s how they think. But I don’t want to assume that the people I like are secretly planning to cheat me.” He smiled up at her. “Senior Sister, is that the world you want to live in?”

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Tian left Sister Li feeling lighter than when he had arrived. For some reason, he was breathing a little easier. Next stop would be the scripture depository to find a complementary art for his new darts.

It all comes down to the size of your fist. He smiled, looking down at his little hands. He had so many fingers now. Almost the full set! With big hands comes a big heart. Big hands could take chances. Big hands can grab, but they can also let go.

The rats would come and eat you when you slept because they were hungry, and they were more scared of an empty belly than you. The foxes would steal the food from your snare, because why not? Was food easy to come by? A Martial Uncle would let a whole overstrength patrol die because he did the math, and this was the best outcome for him and the sect. It was a thin profit, but one worth chasing. Little hands were the explanation for it all. No grip.

That’s how you got people like Sima Yu or Martial Uncle Ku. Scrambling for every thin profit, taking minimal risks, because you never knew if this was your once in a lifetime fated opportunity or a fatal trap.

Tian started laughing. Standing in the middle of the street in the middle of the Depot in the middle of a war zone, he laughed his head off. Laughed so hard he had to lean against the side of a building to stay on his feet.

“What idiots! The scorpions have figured it out better than them. The whole damn world is nothing but opportunities. You just have to be strong enough to make use of them. You might be starving, but you still go for it!”

Tian walked over to the scripture pavilion. In the Temple, this was an airy and well lit library, with soft wooden shelves and lovingly tended, immaculate volumes that transmitted the true teachings of the Ancient Crane Monastery to its most junior and remote members. It was a place of heritage, a way of saying that the Outer Court was part of something truly ancient and mighty. That the Mountain offered more than power. It offered a path.

Not here. The scripture pavilion in Depot Four didn’t give a fuck what the true whatsits of whosits were. You could be as enlightened as you wanted after the war ended. They had killing tools. The shelves were steel, grey, and labeled with white paint. You couldn’t read the code the signs were written in, but that was fine. The borderline rabid librarians, people selected for their deep scholarship and three-plus digit body count, could.

The Pavilion Master, a Martial Uncle of unknown but significant cultivation, loudly proclaimed that his books killed more heretics in a week than the crafters managed in a year. His logic was debatable. The value of the pavilion was not.

Aside from certain heretical or self destructive arts, any cultivation techniques or combat skills, any alchemical formulae, crafting diagrams, animal or insect rearing guides, quite literally any knowledge of use captured on the battlefield could be sold to the quartermasters who would pass it directly to the scripture pavilion. And the pavilion, notoriously, put it all out on the shelves.

This was a wildly popular move with the rank and file, and a not-so-secret benefit for the front line fighters. Arts that wouldn’t have been available to the Outer Court back in Broad Sky Country were now available for purchase. The opportunities to grow, for those willing to go out and stake their lives for the Monastery, were vast. It might create problems down the road, but, well. It was a war.

Tian verified his identity at the door and was met by a junior librarian. A quiet lady with a gentle voice and eyes that had seen far too much.

“How may I help you, Brother?”

“I am looking for an art suitable for use with thrown darts. I’m level five, and my cultivation art is wood aspected.”

“For dart use, we generally recommend a combat art that leans towards Metal for improved penetration and sharpness. Would that be inconvenient?”

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to match my combat and cultivation arts?” Tian asked. The art he used to manipulate his rope dart, Snake Head Vine Body, was wood aligned, as was his cultivation. His other arts weren’t strongly elemental in nature. He had gotten used to them, but he had taken to Snake Head Vine Body like he was born using it.

“Not always. It tends to be situational. If you have a particularly suitable pairing between your body’s elemental proclivities, your cultivation art and your combat art, you will naturally find it easier to use and quicker to learn. However, each art and elemental alignment favors certain usages. Since the weapon in question is a short, straight throwing implement in the hidden weapon category, maximizing the speed, penetration power and concealability of the dart are the paramount concerns. In that case, taking your level into consideration and factoring in the necessary learning time weighted against the need to quickly deploy the art, a dart throwing art that favors the Metal element is optimal.”

Tian blinked and spent a moment sorting through what the librarian said. He knew most of those words, and could kind of figure out the rest from context. It still felt like getting whacked by one of his reference books.

“Yes. I’m… not exactly sure what the darts will look like, but their core material will make them very hard to see. Actually, an art that could help me recover the darts would be really useful, since they are custom made.”

“Custom darts are not optimal due to their high risk of loss and destruction.”

Tian nodded. That sounded sensible, if he was right about what “optimal” meant. He waited. She waited. He waited some more. So did she. He didn’t have anywhere to go today. This was her job, and she was getting paid either way. They just stood there. Waiting for the other to say something. Eventually one of the other librarians came over and intervened.

“Junior Sister Su, you didn’t ask him a question. Junior Brother, there was an implied invitation to comment in her statement.”

Tian and the female librarian shared a look, clearly disagreeing with the senior brother’s evaluation. However, they chorused “Yes, Senior Brother.”

The male librarian shuddered, squeezed his lucky war pick, and moved on. Tian looked over at his guide and shrugged. “They are the darts I have, and I have good reason to think they will be excellent. Maybe not the best in the world or anything, but I bet they will be very good. So I want to keep using them for a long while. So something that lets me hit hard AND get my darts back is optimal for me.”

She thought about it, then nodded. “Do you know a flying sword art?”

“No, Sister.”

“Well. Would you like to learn something kind of similar?”