The forest grew denser as I followed the river's edge, the sound of moving water a steady companion at my left while the trees pressed closer on my right. The map had guided me true so far, and according to its markings I was now deep enough into the wilderness that ordinary hunters rarely ventured. This was exactly where I needed to be.
The decision to hunt a Red Fox had drawn more than a few raised eyebrows back at the sect.
The name alone carried a certain comedy to it. Red Fox. The moment most people heard those words, something automatic happened in their imagination — a massive creature, bull-sized, fur blazing like hot coals, jaws parting to unleash a torrent of crimson fire across the forest floor. The name simply demanded something dramatic. Something worthy of a proper hunt.
The reality was considerably more humbling.
A Red Fox spirit beast was, in body, almost indistinguishable from the ordinary foxes that wandered any woodland. Dog-sized. Light-footed. Rust-colored fur, bright eyes, a tail that swept the ground behind it. Nothing about its physical appearance suggested danger or rarity. They were not even scarce — they lived in multigenerational groups, three generations of equal-ranked foxes sharing territory, giving birth reliably each year. Any hunter with basic tracking skills could find one given enough time and patience.
What made them worth hunting was not their body. It was their mind.
A Red Fox that had lived long enough accumulated something no amount of physical growth could replicate — memory. Layered, organized, centuries-deep memory. Spirit masters who had successfully taken a Red Fox ring reported gains that had nothing to do with combat power in the conventional sense. They remembered things faster. Learned skills in a fraction of the time. Retained techniques from a single viewing that other cultivators required months to internalize.
For someone at my stage, that was worth far more than brute force.
So I had come here looking for an eight hundred year old specimen. Not the biggest beast in this forest. Not the most dangerous. But the one whose ring, once absorbed, would change the shape of everything that came after.
I spent the better part of a full day searching before the forest finally gave me what I needed.
The signs were subtle at first — a faint depression in the soft earth near the water's edge, a cluster of red hairs caught on the rough bark of a low branch, the faintest trace of a scent that sat somewhere between pine resin and something older and wilder beneath it. I moved slowly, reading each detail without disturbing it, letting the trail build in my mind like a map drawn one careful line at a time.
By late afternoon the signs had grown impossible to miss. A well-worn path ran parallel to the river, the grass flattened in a repeating pattern that spoke of years of use. The same route. The same paws. The same creature returning home through the same corridor of trees so many hundreds of times that the forest itself had quietly reshaped around the habit.
I followed the path with my footsteps silent and my breathing controlled until the river curved sharply inward and the bank narrowed between two large moss-covered boulders.
There it was.
A cave mouth, low and half-hidden where the boulders met the earth, barely wide enough for two people to pass through side by side. From the darkness within came the smell of damp stone and something warm and animal beneath it — the unmistakable signature of a den that had been lived in across generations. The red hair marks ran directly to the entrance and disappeared inside.
I crouched behind a stand of ferns and studied the ground, the boulders, the surrounding trees with careful eyes.
Then I went to work.
I took my time with the preparations. Rushing against a creature that had survived eight centuries by being smarter than everything that had ever tried to kill it would be the last mistake I ever made in this forest.
Three snares went down first, anchored between the thick surface roots of an oak four meters from the cave mouth, each one positioned low and flush with the ground along the path the fox would most naturally follow when it emerged. I worked with slow, deliberate hands, pressing the wire flat, layering dry leaves and loose soil over each one until the ground looked untouched. Until it looked the way it had looked for the last eight hundred years.
When I was satisfied I retreated further back, selected a wide elm with branches thick enough to bear my weight in silence, and climbed until I had a clean, unobstructed view of the cave entrance below. Five meters up. Downwind. Elevated enough that my scent would disperse into the canopy rather than drift along the ground toward the cave.
I settled against the trunk, controlled my breathing, and let the forest forget I was there.
Evening came softly.