Cleo walked around the pile of stone he'd dumped onto the ground, sniffing at the air like a human bloodhound. "I'm supposed to be sniffing out tea? Do you mean brewed tea or dry leaves or damp decaying leaves?"

"Any kind of tea," he said.

"But just tea tea, right? No herbal varieties?"

Hector hadn't even thought of that. "Just regular tea for now."

The remains of the city of Rags stretched out around them. King Huron, also known as the Lord Annihilator, killed his predecessor here with a massive chaos bolt. Rags itself became collateral damage, its buildings collapsing and residents dying from the massive shock wave. Thus far, no one bothered resettling the city. The few survivors evacuated to Toll Burgh before the final stand of the old king. They were an underclass in their new home, surviving mostly due to the charity of Eva.

The old king chose to face Annihilator here instead of at the capital to spare his family. That didn't work out as planned. The entire royal family committed suicide when they heard Annihilator was on his way to the palace. Hector suspected some of those suicides were more accurately termed murders. Innocent children mercy killed by their elders. It turned his stomach to think about it.

He'd learned all those facts by paying Eva for information. Other people around Toll Burgh verified those facts when he questioned them, so he had no reason to doubt what he'd learned. It was all public knowledge. Even the bit about the Mother Elixir being made in a continuous process that couldn't resume if it ever stopped.

His job was to bring back a recipe. If it turned out the recipe wouldn't work, for whatever reason, that wasn't his fault. He thought Zara would honor her agreement to release Riley. The other promised rewards probably wouldn't be coming. Not unless the Zing Emperor felt like rewarding Zara for a useless recipe. He wouldn't bet on that outcome.

"Having a sensory insight has made for an interesting employment history," she said after a long silence interrupted only by snuffling.

"Any good stories?"

"I wish the stories were good. It's mostly bloodhound stuff like this. Technology can see and hear better than me even with my supernatural talent. But sniffing out scents with machines requires chemical detectors specific to the target – I am general purpose and don't require any calibration."

Hector smiled. "How do you get such an insight?"

"For me, dreams." Cleo paused to sniff more intensely at the corner of a particular building before dismissing it entirely from consideration. "The original, though… well, do you know anything about questing?"

"Is that something about going on adventures?"

Cleo chuckled. "Not exactly. At least not in this context. Savants and Sages tend to stumble into their insights. You can't choose when you get a glimpse of ultimate reality. Your mind has to get ninety percent there on its own before resonance brings you the rest of the way. We're not talking academic knowledge, either. This is deep, unshakable belief in something. You can't trial and error your way into it.

"On Maya, it's generally accepted that questing is always a subconscious seeking. Honestly, I'd say it resembles going insane more than anything else. It's obsessive thinking and chasing after random clues to a puzzle you don't even realize you're trying to solve. In my dreams, it was trying to remember what home smelled like while living on the streets. Father passed away, the family became destitute, and a teen girl was desperate to find the elusive scents that recalled happier days.

"Like I said… it felt like she was going insane. She almost got herself killed breaking into places she should not have been so that she could analyze scents she caught a whiff of in passing. Her missions randomly branched out into looking for furniture of the same style in her memory and listening for the familiar chiming of the clock tower. By the time she earned her glimpse she was known as a madwoman by the town. Sadly, becoming a savant with a weird insight did not drastically improve her life."

They walked around the perimeter of the city. Cleo sniffed with every step while Hector kept an eye on their surroundings. In the unlikely event that another person arrived, he would need to either kill them or flee. Fleeing would mean not coming back to Rags again, so he didn't like that option. The idea of killing a random witness didn't make him feel warm and tingly either.

Those concerns proved unfounded. No one came to the city that first day. They managed to do about half the perimeter before stopping to set up camp for the night. Hector hid their tent among the rubble so that they couldn't be seen from the air and they ate cold rations.

They finished the perimeter the next day. The third day they began wandering among the interior of the city. On the conclusion of day five, Cleo announced she was ninety percent confident that there was no tea within the ruins of Rags.

Though he'd known with every day that passed such a conclusion was ever more likely, it still hit Hector hard. Rags was the safe place to search. The other two locations associated with the previous dynasty were an abandoned fort along the border shared with Zing and the capital city of Kern, where the Lord Annihilator lived.

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Going to the capital of Kern in the company of an Arahant would be asking to die. An abandoned border fort… well, if he managed to find it at all, he would face a lot of competition from Zing treasure hunters who were close to the border of their own country.

So on the sixth day of paying for Cleo's services, Hector loaded his transit sphere with stone and traveled back to Union Central. He made the trip three times to completely swap out the stone blocks, then let Cleo go home for a shower, hot meal, and time in her own bed. He allowed himself the same comforts even if he didn't feel he deserved them.

He managed to sleep, but woke early to brood on matters. Further search of Rags would be a waste of time. The border fort and Kern were out of the question, at least while he had Cleo with him. So how did he best use her time? He finally decided to investigate the cities around Rags. Someone might have found the recipe already. Maybe that's who bought the tea leaves from Zing to set off the whole treasure hunt – someone trying to restart the process outlined in the recipe.

When Cleo arrived outside Tian Tower, he traveled them into the storage cavern of the city Bach – the storage cavern that led to the tunnel through the mountain where he honed his touch sense. For half a day, Cleo sniffed around the stored equipment and goods for any hint of their goal. She homed in on a lot of false leads, which were usually weed residue stuck to farming equipment.

That night, they snuck through the town in the dark. Hector once used a cable to trip a drunk man who glanced in their direction, but otherwise they went unobserved as they carried out the mission. Unobserved did not mean successful, however. Cleo found nothing.

The next night, they did the same in the city of Baden and had identical results: nothing.

By this point, he was halfway through the time he'd contracted Cleo for and had begun to feel despair creep up on him. At some point, he knew, he had to accept that he'd failed. Never giving up sounded like a heroic stance, but the actuality of it was nothing of the sort. He was bumbling around a failed state and exacerbating the problems that the locals faced.

The only good he had done in Stein was trade goods with Eva. That lowered the cost of basic necessities for the people of Toll Burgh and indirectly funded a community of refugees. If he resumed that practice, he could bring back cheap foods for the Tian Tower cafe instead of taking payment in gold. It would be one small positive to his journeys here.

But first he would need to pay Eva the ten level eight cores he owed her. No one was selling level eight cores to someone like him, though. That was a resource hoarded by the powerful. If he wanted high level cores, then he needed to kill high level beasts.

Which, come to think of it, he could probably do.

Provided he could locate suitable prey.

"Cleo? New mission. I want to find a level eight beast."

The Arahant woman stopped playing with the greasy disaster her hair had become over the course of their camping adventure. "Specifically level eight? Do you care what kind?"

"The kind that I can trick into drinking poison." He fished out his two vials of cyanide.

"So any level eight animal. You're lucky my mental sense is enhanced by my insight. This still won't be fast, Hector. You have seven days left and that might not be long enough."

"It can't be any harder than finding the Mother Elixir recipe."

The two of them switched strategies then. They began in the wilderness near Rags and hiked around. Hector carried Cleo on his back and occasionally flew to speed their progress. They spent a lot of time on the branches of tall trees and sniffing around water sources.

Three days of dubious productivity passed before they found their first lead: shed snake skin radiating peak level seven might. That could indicate a beast whose body enhancement lagged behind its soul level. So Cleo sniffed at the skin to memorize the specific smell of its musk and then they were off to scout the local area.

Cleo found its scent heavy everywhere. Their snake hunted all around that particular mountain slope and was in the process of molting, leaving little bits of itself everywhere. Not only did the maze of overlapping scent trails delay their progress, so did their hesitance to charge into the underbrush. There was, after all, a large snake on the loose.

Neither Hector nor Cleo knew their snakes well enough to identify specific species. The scales told them nothing. Even a good look at the animal itself wouldn't be sufficient. What Hector really wanted to know was if their target could be considered venomous. Definite knowledge one way or the other would impact how he approached their hunt.

At dusk, they set up their tent and ate another cold meal. Hector fought off the dour mood by attempting a lighter topic. "Do you remember that Ogre I stayed behind to fight on Eden?"

"I remember. All of Misfit Squad assumed you would run once you caught sight of it."

Hector grinned. "Maybe if I was smarter."

Cleo perked up. "Did you kill a level ten Ogre?"

"I tried my best, but no. She was tough. Healed instantly." His smile faded. The story wasn't actually as fun as he thought. "Cataclysm killed Mila in the fight. I was pretty desperate, so I forced the Ogre into my transit sphere and brought her to Tian." Cleo sat up straighter and looked around the interior of the tent, head cocked as if listening for something.

"Relax. I didn't leave her anywhere near here."

"No, not the Ogre." Cleo's pointed towards the zipped entrance to their tent. "There's a snake out there. I think it dropped from a tree."

Hector reached towards the zipper and had his hand smacked. Cleo gestured at the rear of the tent, so Hector pulled out a knife and made a new door. The two of them slipped out, got some distance, and studied the critter hunting them.

"Only level seven," Hector muttered. "And it took our supplies hostage."

"I'm not attached to any of the possessions in there. Let's get out of here."

Hector summoned his transit sphere. "Fine. We'll sleep on Union Central and commute from now on." There were only three more days left in their joint venture anyway.

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