The last ten wolves took three days, not because they were harder to find, but because Xu Yuan, more than once, chose not to look too hard for them.
He told himself it was caution. Some part of him suspected it was something closer to reluctance — a wish to stay, just a little longer, on this side of whatever door the Interface had built out of a hundred small, ordinary fights, before finding out what waited on the other side.
The hundredth wolf died on an overcast afternoon in the same stretch of forest where his very first fight had happened, weeks ago now, back when he'd still been counting days since waking in the ash-covered valley instead of counting wolves toward a number that had once felt impossible.
The screen unfolded the moment the animal fell, larger and more crowded with text than it had ever shown him before.
Mission Complete
Gray Wolves: 100 / 100
Reward Unlocked
Basic Sword Understanding: 50%
Current Authority: 5
New Mission Available
The Hollow Places — Progress: 0 / 1
Xu Yuan stood very still, reading the last line three times before he let himself believe it wasn't a mistake.
Not another number to grind through one kill at a time. A single objective, unexplained, its progress marked out of one instead of a hundred — the kind of mission, he understood immediately without needing the Interface to spell it out for him, that wasn't measured by how many times he swung a sword.
He reached toward it the way he'd reached toward every new thing the screen had ever offered him, and this time words unfolded beneath it that hadn't been there a moment before.
Objective: Locate and investigate a site of Hollowing.
Nothing else. No hint of reward, no warning of danger, no explanation of what a site of Hollowing actually was beyond the word itself, sitting there with the same flat certainty as everything else the Interface had ever chosen to show him.
He didn't need the Interface to tell him where to start. He already knew the place — a shallow depression in the earth where the wind refused to enter and the spiritual energy had been scooped clean out of the ground, dozens of animals lying undisturbed and undecayed beneath a stillness that had made every instinct in his body scream the same warning twice.
He'd walked away from it once, weeks ago, because Shen Yu and the Village Chief had spent days teaching him not to rush toward what he didn't understand.
He wondered, standing over the hundredth wolf with the mission's new words hanging silent in the air before him, whether he was finally ready to walk back.
He found Mei Lin at the well before he found the Village Chief, because some part of him needed to say it out loud to someone first, before it became real enough to bring to anyone who might try to stop him.
"I finished it," he said. "The wolves."
She set her basket down slowly, her eyes narrowing at whatever his face was showing that the words alone hadn't. "That's not the face of someone who's relieved."
"There's a new mission. It wants me to go back to the corrupted clearing."
Mei Lin went very still. "The one with the dead animals. The one you told me not to go near."
"That one."
"Are you going to?"
Xu Yuan looked east, past the rooftops, past the fields, toward the tree line where a hundred small fights had slowly built toward something he still didn't fully understand.
"I don't know yet," he said, honestly. "But I don't think it's going to stay a question much longer."
The wind picked up slightly, carrying the first cool edge of evening across the square. Somewhere behind them, the village went on with its ordinary business, unaware that the boy who'd wandered in a month and a half ago with two unexplained swords had just finished the first door the Interface had ever opened for him, and was already standing at the edge of the second.