After that we went back to the guild to cash out the mission. Two silver for the beast, three for the materials — five total. I tried to split some with Liam. He refused again.
At the market I found a decent dagger for three silver. It wasn't quite tier 1 — the materials had been right but the smith had made a mistake during forging, and it had fallen just short. Still more than enough for the work we were doing.
Time passed. We fell into a routine — wake up, eat, missions. After enough nagging Liam finally started accepting his share of the rewards. I think he only did it for my sake. I didn't ask. It at least made me feel less indebted, even if I couldn't emotionally feel it.
After months of that grind we finally had enough for a tier 2 manual. It might have taken less if we didn't have to eat and pay for somewhere to sleep — but we're still human, so we couldn't skip that.
After buying the manual the pace of missions slowed down. I focused mainly on cultivating. Liam lived his own life — still cultivating, just not as obsessively as me. Most of his time went to small missions when he was bored, or to the pubs where he seemed to know half the regulars by name.
Eventually we upgraded our gear. A true tier 1 weapon each. With better equipment we decided to move up — tier 1 peak beast missions paid several times what the standard ones did, which meant fewer missions and more cultivation time for the same resources.
The first tier 1 peak hunt showed us something immediately. We approached the same way as always — wait for it to sleep, then strike. We got close, slow and careful, and just as we were about to move it woke up. Not fast enough to defend itself properly, but awake. It still died. But the awareness difference was noticeable — more alert, more attuned to its surroundings than anything we'd hunted before. I'd known tier 1 peak beasts were more sensitive to their environment. I hadn't expected the gap to be this significant.
We adjusted our strategy after that. Less relying on catching them asleep, more on luring them into traps. It worked well enough.
Time continued to pass. With the resources from all those missions my cultivation moved faster than anything the Lin family's basic routine had ever produced. Two years after leaving them, I reached the 1st tier peak. The breakthrough to the 2nd tier was within reach whenever I chose to attempt it.
I was considering when to try when a posting on the mission board caught my eye.
A rare beast. A Mistdeer — named for the mist that seemed to surround it wherever it moved. The mist made it easier to spot from a distance but harder to track precisely, obscuring its exact location and masking when it might strike. The reward was higher than anything we'd taken before.