Luck
Qinghu's aura turned razor-sharp in an instant. Fair enough.
In this world, a spiritual beast's newborn cub was prized more highly than its core. A cub carried more spiritual essence than the core its parent held within.
So, inhuman as it was, cultivators usually went feral the moment they laid eyes on a spiritual beast's young, already tasting orphan stew.
"Ahh. Relax. I've got no intention of harming your cub."
"What?"
When Han Yuhyeon dropped his guard and raised both hands, it was Qinghu who looked thrown. The reaction was almost identical to the one Qinghu had given upon realizing the man from the mission board was, against all odds, halfway normal.
"You expect me to trust a cultivator's word?"
Qinghu was deep in denial. Han Yuhyeon looked at the tiger with a deliberately pitying gaze.
"Yeah, yeah. Fair. Cultivators are lunatics as a rule. But I'm different."
"The ones who say that out loud are usually the special kind of insane."
"I'm serious. What do I have to do to make you believe me?"
"If you truly are that rare benevolent cultivator — rarer than a needle in the desert — then leave this place at once."
"Tsk. You know one thing and miss the other. Ever consider that I could head straight back to Baekun-pa and bring more cultivators with me?"
At that, Qinghu's eyes went round with alarm. Even with spiritual essence piled up inside it, the intelligence was still a beast's.
"T-true enough. Then what am I supposed to do?"
"Hmm. I'd like to hear your thoughts first. What do you think would be best?"
"Honestly, only one thing comes to mind."
"Which is?"
"Kill you. Silence the witness."
Classic Yeonhwa Seonrok. Call it a spiritual beast all you like — the thinking never strayed far from the usual. Fortunately, Han Yuhyeon had a defense ready.
"Don't you know that if a spiritual beast harms a human, it becomes a demonic beast?"
"I know. But that applies to the innocent. Killing someone who means me harm doesn't count."
"I'm not harming you, though."
"What."
Qinghu's eyes went wide. Clearly that angle had never crossed its mind.
"R-right. Cultivators are always trying to kill me, so I never even considered it."
"Exactly. I'm not harming you. I don't plan to, either. You're a spiritual beast — you can at least sense killing intent."
"Plenty of cultivators know how to hide theirs."
"I'm not high enough realm yet to have learned any Concealment Art that could mask killing intent."
"I can't trust that either. You might be hiding your realm right now."
"Look at my face."
"……!"
Qinghu's jaw dropped. The counter had landed square in its blind spot.
"H-honestly, yes. With a face like that, there's no way your realm is high. Cultivators usually get better looking the higher they climb."
"So you've finally figured it out."
Han Yuhyeon huffed a short laugh and crossed his arms with deliberate swagger.
"I mean, he wouldn't have known I was here and deliberately made his face this ugly beforehand. And that level of ugliness isn't something makeup or an ordinary disguise technique could pull off anyway…"
Qinghu muttered to itself in confusion. The persuasion was working exactly as Han Yuhyeon intended — and his mood sank in inverse proportion.
He waited patiently while Qinghu's thought process ground along. Before long, the tiger nodded.
"I believe you. You really are a cultivator who doesn't mean me harm."
"Glad you figured it out, even if it took a while."
Han Yuhyeon forced the corner of his mouth up. He hadn't expected the ugly face to be useful, but that didn't make it any more pleasant.
"But if killing you to silence you is off the table, then what am I supposed to do?"
Qinghu sounded genuinely lost. The situation was badly stacked against it. With no killing intent to justify a kill, and with Han Yuhyeon free to walk out and announce that a spiritual beast's cub was here, mother and child would end up as garnish in some cultivator's stew by nightfall.
"The point is, you can't let me leave Neungha-gok. We have to settle this inside the valley."
"I agree. But I still don't know how."
"Simple. We build trust."
Qinghu tilted its head. Fair reaction — trust was the single most alien word in the Yeonhwa Seonrok world.
"Right. If we actually feel some goodwill toward each other, I won't have any reason to report you."
"Does that just… pile up on command?"
"At the start, affinity builds through reciprocity. I help you, you help me. That simple."
"Sounds awfully abstract."
"What I can offer you is straightforward."
Han Yuhyeon said it plainly.
"Until you leave this place, I don't leave either. Nothing more airtight than that."
"…Even for a spiritual beast's cub, it'll take at least a month before it can walk properly. So we leave no sooner than a month from now. You're saying you'll stay here a full month?"
"Not impossible."
He was already at one-star Qi Condensation. A month on nothing but water wouldn't threaten his life at all.
"Why would you go that far for me? No one hates wasting time more than cultivators."
Qinghu kept doubting to the end. Han Yuhyeon didn't hold it against the beast. Surviving as a spiritual beast in this rotten world required at least that much caution.
"Obviously you'll be helping me just as much, right? Enough that I don't regret spending a whole month grinding it out in Neungha-gok. That's reciprocity. That's how trust gets built."
"So that's how it works. Not a bad deal for me either. When a spiritual beast helps a human, spiritual essence accumulates. I've never helped a cultivator before, though. Ugly face, sharp mind."
At last Qinghu lowered its guard. Persuasion successful. Not completely — a baseline wariness remained — but Han Yuhyeon was doing the same, so he didn't mind.
"Problem is, I don't have much I can offer you right now. I spent a lot of spiritual essence giving birth, and I can't leave Neungha-gok at the moment."
Qinghu muttered, watching his face. Han Yuhyeon grinned.
"Don't worry about that. I've got something I need from you too."
"From me, right now?"
"Yeah. It's simple, so don't tense up."
Han Yuhyeon ran through the Neungha-gok event in his head. The conditions were straightforward: Luck of 100 or higher, and accepting the unfair Neungha-gok mission from the board.
Then, while gathering Green Eye Herbs, you ran into a White Deer. The deer would wordlessly lead the player to a rare-grade spiritual herb, and once the player took it, the deer would take flight and vanish. A pure free-loot event.
So why had he gotten Qinghu instead of a White Deer? Because his Luck was over 200? Sure, the Yeonhwa Seonrok community had plenty of posts cataloging encounters that unlocked at Luck 100 or 150 and up — but he'd never seen anything for 200 or higher. Building a character like that was supposed to be impossible.
So I met Qinghu because my Luck is over 200?
Still, if the beast was going to lead him to a spiritual herb either way, White Deer or Qinghu didn't seem to make much difference. Then again, meeting one at Luck 200 meant the reward might be better than the White Deer's — hope springs eternal.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Ah. Simple. There's a spiritual herb somewhere in Neungha-gok. I'd like you to find it for me."
The reason this hidden-piece event demanded high Luck was simple: without a spiritual beast, you couldn't find the herb. Only a spiritual beast, with a sense of smell sharpened far beyond any human's, could track it down.
"…A spiritual herb?"
Qinghu's expression turned oddly complicated. Reading a tiger's face was ridiculous, but it looked strangely wilted and flustered.
"Yeah. Azure Spirit Grass, probably."
Han Yuhyeon dredged up the memory. In this world, the valuable spiritual herbs and medicinal ingredients were usually the ones you couldn't cultivate.
Azure Spirit Grass was one of those. It couldn't be farmed at all — it just grew wherever and however it felt like, no conditions required. It also hid its own spiritual essence and grew buried underground, so unless you tore up the earth at random, finding it was nearly impossible.
As finicky as it was, the effect was rock solid. Azure Spirit Grass was an item that raised maximum spiritual power. In the xianxia world, spiritual power was mana. For Han Yuhyeon, whose stats had all been dumped into Luck at the expense of everything basic, it was exactly the medicine he needed.
"Azure Spirit Grass…"
Qinghu mumbled. Around then, Han Yuhyeon finally caught on — and a bad feeling crept in.
"…For the sake of our trust, I'll tell you. There was Azure Spirit Grass in Neungha-gok. But I already fed it to my cub."
"……."
Luck 200 encounter, my ass. Should he just put a pot on the fire? Eat the spiritual-beast cub that ate the spiritual herb. Wasn't that the food chain right there? The thought crossed his mind in that exact moment.
"I-is there anything else I can help with? I'm good at digging up Green Eye Herbs. Those don't grow in colonies either, so humans have a hard time finding them. With my nose, it's easy."
Qinghu rushed to add more. Of course none of it registered with Han Yuhyeon.
But he had no real choice. Honestly, he wasn't confident he could win a life-or-death fight against Qinghu. Better to plant a debt with this spiritual beast and cash it in later. That was the rational play.
"…Fine. Then let's dig Green Eye Herbs."
"R-right! I'll help with everything I've got!"
Qinghu brimmed with enthusiasm. Well — the beast knew as well as anyone how fast a cultivator who'd been robbed of something precious could turn.
If I were just at three-star Qi Condensation…
He'd have skinned the tiger on the spot and made a rug for the house. Han Yuhyeon tasted bitterness.
"Let's go! The scent of Green Eye Herbs is already thick! I'll dig up every last one in Neungha-gok!"
Qinghu made a show of it and took the lead. Even the tiger seemed a little embarrassed about wolfing down the Azure Spirit Grass.
With luck like his, Han Yuhyeon probably would have found Green Eye Herbs just fine on his own. Still, having a spiritual beast along changed the efficiency entirely.
Qinghu excavated with those massive forepaws and somehow never so much as nicked a single blade of Green Eye Herb. With the tiger on the job, the herbs piled up at a blistering pace by dusk.
Qinghu was a tiger with a highly developed sense of smell, after all. Randomly harvesting Green Eye Herbs off a Luck stat and harvesting them with map hack turned on were never going to have the same efficiency.
Well. This isn't bad either.
Watching the Green Eye Herbs stack up as the light failed, Han Yuhyeon felt his mood ease a little. The real consolation was that this mission had no upper limit — every herb he hauled back was money.
Even with the best luck, ten was usually the most anyone pulled from this mission. Already nearly thirty Green Eye Herbs lay heaped by evening. That alone was fifteen hundred spiritual stones.
Just thinking about what he'd buy from the Mongan Hyeolseo put him in a good mood already.
"Hm?"
Still clawing at the earth, Qinghu made a sound.
"What, did you nick a herb?"
"No. There's something underground. I can feel a faint trace of spiritual energy. For it to be this faint, it must be buried pretty deep."
Qinghu spoke as it dug. Those forepaws packed nearly excavator-grade power. Han Yuhyeon followed the tiger down into the earth. Qinghu carved out a good ten zhang — thirty meters deep, easy.
"Found it."
At last Qinghu scraped carefully with a paw and uncovered what lay buried there. Han Yuhyeon stared at what the tiger pulled free and froze.
What Qinghu held up was a jar of jade light — an item known in-game as an Okhang.
…So it was real.
Exactly as Han Yuhyeon had thought. This Qinghu was a creature you only met at Luck 200 or higher.