The Smithing District of Fortress Oakhaven was less a neighborhood and more a singular sprawling machine.

  The air here tasted of sulfur and coal dust. The ground vibrated with the synchronized rhythm of a thousand hammers striking hot steel. It was a symphony of creation and destruction. A place where the raw materials of the earth were beaten into the tools of war.

  Krell moved through the crowded streets. He stopped before a large open-air smithy. Inside, three shirtless men with arms like tree trunks were working a piece of glowing metal. They moved with a fluidity that Krell appreciated. One held the tongs, one struck with a heavy sledge and the third worked the bellows to keep the spirit-fire roaring white-hot.

  "Too slow on the upswing," Krell grunted to himself as he was watching the sledge-wielder. " The metal is cooling too fast on the edges. Brittle."

  He wasn't trying to be critical; it was just his nature. As a master blacksmith himself, seeing imperfect technique was like hearing a discordant note in a song. He moved to step closer to get a better look at the quenching process but his path was suddenly blocked.

  Five cultivators stepped out from the shadow of an alleyway. They weren't guards and they weren't smiths. They wore the mismatched armor of freelance hunters. Their cloaks were stained with travel and old blood.

  The leader, a man with a wild beard and eyes that looked like broken glass, pointed a trembling finger at Krell.

  "Demon," the man spat. The word wasn't an accusation; it was a curse.

  Krell stopped. He felt the shift in the air immediately. The rhythmic clanging of the nearby smithies seemed to falter as people turned to watch.

  "I am Sanctioned," Krell rumbled back. His voice deep and gravelly from within the mist. He tapped the iron token on his belt. "Move."

  "Sanctioned?" The man laughed, a high, jagged sound. He drew a serrated saber. "My brother was killed in the Grey-Water Valley. Ripped in half by a thing of your kind. Did he care if the demon was sanctioned or not?"

  "I was at the Valley," Krell said calmly. "I killed the things that killed your brother."

  "Liar!" the man screamed. Grief twisted his face into something ugly. "You're all the same! Filth from the rifts! You come here, walk our streets, breathe our air... while we bury our dead!"

  The man lunged. It wasn't a calculated attack; it was a swing born of blinding pain.

  Krell didn't even draw a weapon. He simply hardened his skin. The obsidian beneath the mist shifted and turned impenetrable against such a weak attack.

  CLANG.

  The saber struck Krell’s forearm. It didn't cut. The blade vibrated violently and was sending a shockwave back up the man’s arm that made him drop the weapon.

  "He attacked!" one of the man's companions shouted as he went to draw a spear. "Kill the beast!"

  The group surged forward and their Qi flaring. They were mostly Foundation Establishment cultivators with the leader being at the peak of the realm. To Krell, they were children. He could snap their necks before they blinked.

  But he didn't.

  "Hold!"

  A roar erupted from the smithy Krell had been watching. The head smith, a burly man covered in soot and holding a red-hot pair of tongs, stepped between Krell and the mob.

  "Are you lot blind or just stupid?" The smith bellowed. He pointed at the token on Krell’s belt. "That’s a High Council Token! He’s Sanctioned! You touch him, you answer to the Council!"

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  "He's a demon, Horgar!" the hunter screamed as he was trying to push past the smith. "He doesn't belong here!"

  "He belongs where the Council says he belongs!" another voice chimed in. A shopkeeper from across the street stepped out and was holding a crossbow. "We have laws here! Without the Sanctioned clans, who clears the deep mines? Who holds the northern flank at frost-fall? You?"

  "They killed my brother!" the hunter sobbed. His rage collapsed into misery.

  "And my son died last winter!" the shopkeeper shot back. "But I don't go stabbing a pet beast from someone else just because a beast killed him! Use your head, man! This one isn't the enemy! He just said he helped to fight against the attack a few days ago."

  The mob faltered. The sudden defense from their own people confused them. They looked at Krell. A hulking nightmare of fog and magma and then at the ordinary citizens standing in front of him.

  Krell stood motionless in the center of the chaos. He felt a strange sensation in his chest. It wasn't anger. It was confusion as well but then he felt a warmth that people he didn’t know were defending him.

  One side wanted to kill him for what he was. The other side defended him because he was useful or perhaps simply because they respected the law more than their hatred.

  The hunter who had dropped his sword stared at Krell as tears were streaming down his face into his beard. "Why? Why are you here? Why don't you just go back to the hell you crawled out of?"

  Krell looked down at the man. The mist around his head thinned slightly, revealing the glowing orange embers of his eyes.

  "The rifts are not my home," Krell said, his voice surprisingly soft. "The things that crawl out of them... the stalkers, the behemoths... they are not my kin. They are madness given flesh. They do not come from my home. They come from somewhere else."

  He stepped forward. The hunter flinched but Krell didn't strike.

  "You hate me?" Krell asked. "Good. Hate is fuel. But don't waste it on me. I bleed the same enemies you do."

  He looked around at the gathering crowd. The smiths, the hunters and the civilians.

  "If you hate demons so much," Krell said, his voice rising to carry over the noise of the district, "then get stronger. Forge better steel. Cultivate harder. Don't weep in the street and swing at shadows. Kill the things that actually took your kin. Because I promise you... I will be there doing the same."

  Silence stretched across the street. The hunter looked at his trembling hands and then at his fallen sword. He didn't pick it up. He just turned and walked away with his shoulders slumped in defeat. He was confused and overwhelmed.

  The crowd began to disperse with the tension bleeding out of the air like heat from cooling iron.

  "You alright, big guy?" the smith, Horgar, asked, wiping soot from his forehead.

  "I am fine," Krell grunted. "Your upswing is slow. You're losing heat."

  The smith blinked and then barked a laugh. "Aye? Well, come inside then. Show me how you'd do it."

  Krell went inside and spent a long time talking and showing the smiths here. He taught them skills they hadn’t seen before and they in turn did the same. It was a sharing of expertise from masters. Krell taught more than he learned because he was a higher level than them but the experience was still useful to him.

  After a long time he stepped out of the shop and was thinking about which shop he should visit next. Then Li Yu appeared next to him.

  "Rough morning?" Li Yu asked as he began to walk toward the city gates.

  "Humans are complicated," Krell muttered.

  They stopped at a street vendor near the gates and bought meat pies wrapped in wax paper. The pastry was flaky, the filling a rich and savory mix of spiced mutton and root vegetables. They ate as they walked with the hot food chasing away the chill of the air.

  Li Yu contacted the people he made connections with in the market. He met up with them and quickly traded away what they needed for their demonic cores. They didn’t empty everything out but they were willing to accept just about anything in place of demonic cores. This made the transactions easy and benefitted to both sides.

  They didn't stay in Oakhaven that night. The city felt too crowded and too loud. They exited the North Gate just as the sun began to set. They walked for a few miles until the city was just a glowing smudge on the horizon. Li Yu found a sheltered hollow beneath a ridge of rock that was protected from the biting wind.

  He set up a simple camp. A few waves of his hand and out came some array disks that created a formation that blocked the wind and trapped heat. He started a camp fire as the two of them got comfortable.

  The sky above was a canvas of dancing lights. The colored lights shifting from emerald green to deep violet.

  "The energy here is dense," Li Yu noted as he was sitting cross-legged by the fire. "Chaotic, but dense. It forces the body to work harder just to cycle Qi."

  "It makes the steel harder too," Krell added. "I looked at the blades in the smithy. Even the common iron here has trace amounts of frost essence. Helping to make it stronger, more durable and harder at the same time."