After the departure of the bandits, no one was in the mood to continue celebrating. Wu Ling insisted that everyone sleep and get rest while he stayed awake to keep an ear out for the bandits. Without either a formation from Fang Lin or his alarm bullfrogs to alert the group, sharp senses would have to serve as the only early warning they would receive.
Thankfully, the night passed peacefully. Hou returned with the location of the bandit camp, more than two hours of hiking away from the group, and when the Golden Crow returned to observe their camp the next day, he came back with word of the bandits moving further east, expanding their search for the elusive 'Sister Vixen.'
While Wu Ling kept an ear out for potential threats, he spent much of his time reviewing the manuals in the inheritance of the Illusory Butterfly Immortal Empress that pertained to carving. In order to use this art as an opportunity to break through, he wanted to completely put aside his own thoughts on how to best use the art and instead, immerse himself in the motives of the person who developed his manual.
He'd done himself a disservice by looking ahead to learning Inscriptions but thankfully, he hadn't made much progress and he was still able to wipe his slate clean.
At the beginning of the expedition, he'd looked over the different mediums that he could practice carving and found that each offered slightly different opportunities. It wasn't just that some materials were harder to work with than others.
Carving jade, for example, was not only more difficult than carving wood, but it required more extensive tools and significantly more spiritual energy to empower the resulting artwork. Spirit jades were potent materials but at his current cultivation, they were entirely out of reach.
That left him with two paths that felt viable for learning on the journey. Wood carving was vast, and intricate, and paved the way to all manner of constructs. Wood was forgiving to work with and perhaps the easiest place to begin his craft.
Unfortunately, it was also the least enduring material to work with. The battle against the wolves gave him a clear lesson on just how far he and his companions still had to go before they could wander the wilderness with impunity.
If he wanted to carve things from wood, at best he felt that he could produce superior versions of his present talismans. When his cultivation progressed further, he was certain that he could work with species of wood that were as resilient and durable as steel but that was too far away for the moment.
At the same time, the group had already made the decision to hunt multiple spirit beasts over the course of their expedition. Beast cores and the hearts of powerful spirit beasts were frequently the most prized because they could be used the most broadly. Some items had specific alchemical uses and Yu Jinqi would be certain to speak up about such things if they came across them. The bones of beasts, however, were useless to almost everyone in the group outside of using them as trophies.
From Wu Ling's perspective, that made it the perfect medium for him to explore a new form of art with. He wouldn't be depriving his companions of anything they relied on for their own cultivation and if their hunting was fruitful, he would have plenty of materials to practice with and make mistakes while he learned.
Yu Jinqi had lent his considerable expertise to Wu Ling's endeavor, producing a number of solutions that helped to strip the flesh from bones and otherwise prepare them for carving. Now, as the sun began to peak above the hills, Wu Ling surveyed the growing pile of bones at the edge of the lake and tried to imagine it as buckets of paint or stacks of paper.
It was one thing to see the beautiful bone and ivory carvings that showed up in marketplaces. It was something else entirely to look at a pile of bones and see 'art supplies' instead of 'remains.'
His contemplation was soon interrupted by approaching footsteps
"Good Morning," Xiong Dahuo said, taking a seat on a boulder near Wu Ling. "Since you didn't wake anyone, I'm guessing your ploy worked."
"It seems to have worked so far," Wu Ling agreed. "I didn't expect you to be the first one up Brother Xiong," he teased. The red-haired Brawler had drank more than anyone last night and even with Yu Jinqi's concoction to help, he expected it to take several more hours for the other man to sleep it off.
"Don't do that," Xiong Dahuo said, surprising Wu Ling with the intensity of his tone. "Wu Ling, you and I… Things will never be simple between us. I've been trying to settle my mind ever since we met up in Blade's Edge," the young man continued, looking out over the lake shrouded in early morning mist as he spoke.
"At the banquet, you humiliated me badly," he said, giving Wu Ling a brief glare before returning his gaze to the misty lake. "It's not that I object to the way you defeated me. I never should have given you a free move. If I hadn't, things might have been very different that night. Still, I wanted nothing more than to find a chance to humiliate you in return someday."
"But you don't feel that way any longer," Wu Ling said, kneeling down and retrieving one of the tusks from last night's boar to fidget with while he spoke. He didn't even need to look at Xiong Dahuo to know that the colors painted over the other man no longer held resentment.
"No, not any longer," Xiong Dahuo agreed. "For a little bit, I wanted to kill you for giving me that letter, but I got over that too. Master, she… she did more than just open my eyes when she took me in. You know, I haven't had a teacher for three years now," he said, standing up from the rock and picking up a stone to skip across the lake. "I had a teacher before, one of the Wardens of the sect who saw potential in me."
"Three years ago? Then…."
"Your mother killed him when she attacked the sect," Xiong Dahuo confirmed, skipping another stone across the lake with enough strength that it vanished into the morning mist in the distance.