by Will Wight
Hearing someone say they were ‘just’ a Gold was like hearing an emperor say his summer palace ‘just’ had a thousand rooms, but the idea that he wasn’t ready for a Path sent chills up his back.
“So, if I understand you correctly, then I’m not…I mean, I’ll never be…” He couldn’t squeeze the words out.
She snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Are your ears open? What did I say? I don’t know how to get you in condition for my Path. The Path of the Endless Sword is pretty choosy, but most Paths are not. I’ve met more than a few masters who wouldn’t even look at a student before Iron.”
Lindon breathed deeply again as the chills faded, but he didn’t miss a word. “These masters are beyond Gold, you say. What kind of a realm is that?”
“Gold is a wide river to ford,” she said dryly, “especially for somebody who hasn’t so much as touched Copper. You want to advance, you’d best clear out your mind.”
He took the opportunity to stretch his sore back and look around. Samara wasn’t the last mountain they’d crossed since leaving Sacred Valley, and snow-capped peaks hid the halo that would be lighting up the Wei clan’s night. Without the Thousand-Mile Cloud, the horse-sized pillow of opaque red fog that hovered off to the side of their campsite, they would never have made it through the mountains in only a few days.
Here in the foothills, they were nestled between two house-sized boulders and a scrubby bundle of trees. The late-summer wind was mild but unceasing, and it flowed down the mountain with a tinge of autumn chill. Their “campsite” was nothing more than a fire, a collapsed tree Yerin had dragged over for a bench, and a pair of thin blankets he’d placed on the ground.
Behind them rose the mountains he’d left behind. In front of them, the land lowered further until rolling hills spread out beneath them. Yerin called this place the Desolate Wilds, though it seemed more wild than desolate. The hills were carpeted in trees with scorch-black leaves, marred with the occasional strange-colored lights or patch of ash. The forest filled him with dread, as though he stared down into deep water with no idea what sort of monstrous creature might rise from the depths at any second.
Because there were creatures in those dark trees. He’d seen them.
“Before we start, if I may ask…Copper, will it help me survive down there?”
Yerin looked like someone who had lived alone in the wilderness for too long—she was thin and wiry, without an ounce of fat, and her traditional black sacred artist’s robe was faded and tattered. Her hair was black as her robe and cut absolutely straight, which he suspected she did with her sword.
She was a survivor, she had been even before her master was murdered, and she looked the part. She knew what it took to make it out of a deadly wilderness alive, while he’d slept on a cloud-soft mattress since he was a child.
She shrugged one shoulder. “Going down there without Copper is like going in with a hood over your eyes. You’d lose your head without a glimpse of what buried you. Going in with Copper…well, at least you’ll see what’s eating you.”
He knelt opposite her, so that their knees were almost touching. With both their backs straight, he was head and shoulders taller than she was. He slouched a little, almost on instinct—in his clan, an Unsouled who loomed over his betters would be asking for a beating.
Yerin didn’t seem to notice or care. She continued, “Iron is better by miles. Your sacred arts will still be rotten, but you won’t die to a stray breeze. Presuming we can find a few things tomorrow, like a covered place to sleep, we’ll stay here until you hit Iron. We’ll want to make you hit perfect Iron, so we can lag until end of winter. Come spring, we can move down into the trees.”
Lindon’s breath came a little too fast, and his stomach churned with sickening hope. He’d lived almost sixteen years yearning for Copper, and now she was saying he could reach Iron in just a few more months? It was like hearing her promise that, with a little more effort, he could sprout wings and fly around the sky like a bird.
His own parents were only Iron, and they’d been famous in the Wei clan when they were only a little older than him. Come spring, if he returned to Sacred Valley, how would they see him then?
Memory returned, of a vision he’d once seen: a colossal shadow wading through the mountains like a child wading through a creek, devastating the entire valley.
“Is that the soonest we can leave?” he asked, and she looked at him as though he’d proposed setting themselves on fire.
“So you know, you can rush to Iron, but you surely don’t want to. Ruins your chances of reaching Lowgold. And the weakest sacred artist down there will be Lowgold, so even if you survived a stroll through the trees, it only takes one privileged son with a rotten temper to scatter your bones all through the trees.”
“Pardon, but who is Lowgold?”
She stuck a finger at him as though threatening him with it. “You’re proving my point for me. It’s not a who, it’s what you call the first rank of Gold.”
“Rank?”
“I told you Gold was a wide river. The weakest Golds are Lowgold, then Highgold, and Truegold past that. The gap between each one is ten times wider than the gap between Copper and Iron, and if you were a shade quicker and two shades smarter, you’d hole up here for a handful of years until you hit Lowgold.”
If he’d thought he was impressed before, this time his lungs froze. Gold? Even if it took him a few years, Suriel had told him he had three decades. Suddenly he didn’t feel as though he were on such a tight schedule after all.
She waved a hand at him. “That’s the sweetest view of events. Spine of the matter is, we’re not trying to catch the tide. A year or two won’t change much.”
Part of that statement stuck out to Lindon like a burning bush. We’re not trying to catch the tide. She’d included herself, as though she intended to stay with him.
That meant more to him than he was prepared to consider, carving into his heart with a sweet pain. For most of his life, even his family had only taken his side out of blood obligation. An Unsouled wasn’t headed anywhere except straight into the ground, and no one wanted to travel with him on that journey.
Now, here was someone who had already fulfilled her oath—she’d taken him out of Sacred Valley safely. He’d half-expected her to walk off and leave him the second he’d finished bandaging her wounds.
But in five days, she still hadn’t said a word of it.
Still kneeling, he bowed to her, pressing his fists together. “Gratitude,” he said.
She flushed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Well, every path has a first step. Let’s get you to Copper first. How’s that Starlotus?”
He closed his eyes and visualized his madra. He could just barely feel the power trickling through his spiritual channels, which he always imagined as a dim blue-white light running throughout his body like blood running through veins. The energy pulsed in rhythm with his breath, spinning out from his core and returning after visiting his extremities.
Before this week, his core had been located in the same place as everyone else’s: just below his navel, at his center of gravity, where people said the soul was located. Now, it was an inch to the right.
And to the left, it had a twin.
Both cores shone in his imagination, stretched like inflated bladders until they looked like the size of his fist. He could withdraw his madra into a core and cycle the other one, if he wanted to, but there was no point: both cores held an equal amount of the same madra. He’d cycled every night for the past five days, even using the parasite ring he’d stolen from the Heaven’s Glory School, and hadn’t gained an ounce of power since eating the Starlotus bud. He’d consumed one half of the flower to solidify his foundation in one core, and the other half went to the other. Now, according to Yerin, both cores had reached their capacity.
So it was time to advance.
“The flower’s madra has settled down,” he reported, eyes still shut. Though the Starlotus madra had gone
down smoothly, his cores had still taken a few days to stop swirling like a pair of whirlpools. “They’re calm, they’ve absorbed everything I can give them, and I’m ready.”
His hands trembled on his knees, though he forced them to be still. Now that he was staring it in the face, he wondered if he was ready for Copper. He’d always thought that, by the time he reached this point, he would know more about the sacred arts and would be able to advance with confidence. Most people were following ancient instructions written in their Paths; the only Path he followed was the one he was making up as he went.
But those doubts were nothing next to the bone-deep hunger that gnawed at him. He didn’t just want Copper, he needed it, and his momentary misgivings couldn’t stop him.
And in front of him, he had a teacher more capable than anyone in Sacred Valley: a legendary Gold.
He exhaled carefully, inhaling again in accordance with his Foundation breathing technique. “I’m ready,” he repeated. “What do I do now?”
“Well, you somewhat squeeze it on down. Like you’re wringing water out of your clothes. Then you keep going until you’re done.”
He cracked one eye. “How do I do that?”
She spread her hands. “You somewhat, you know…” She made a fist. “Squeeze it.”
He closed his eyes again and pictured one core being squeezed, as though in the grip of an imaginary hand. Nothing happened.
“That doesn’t seem to have worked,” he said, carefully keeping any accusation from his voice.
“Well, that’s a rusty patch for you, then. You’re in your own boat now.”
He stared at her. “Is that all you can tell me?”
“First time I remember advancing, I was going from Copper to Iron. That puts me at about eight winters old. If I put this together when I was no bigger than a teacup, you ought to have it easy.” She scowled at him. “And don’t give me that look like you’re trying to stab me with your eyeballs, it’s not on my account that I never walked somebody through advancing to Copper before.”
“Forgiveness, I was only concentrating.” That wasn’t entirely true—she was supposed to be the expert. If he knew how to advance, he’d have done it already.
Once again, he closed his eyes and pictured both his cores. Madra looped out of one like web from a spider, and he withdrew it all, drawing his power back into the core. Even with energy as faint as his, he felt it when it was gone; his limbs weakened, his aches intensified, and the cool wind gained just a little more of an edge.
He focused on his core, tightening his awareness on it, and exhaled. Breathing circulated madra, and when he had finally pushed all the air out of his lungs, his spirit stilled. He focused on that one core, shutting out physical sensations, squeezing with all the pressure of his will.
Nothing changed.
He took another breath, and both cores spun lazily once more. This time, he let a little power slide out from the core on the right…but instead of taking it into his madra channels, he held it around the core like a layer of cloud.
It was a simple hunch. He could control the madra freely, as long as it was outside the core. So he used that madra like a fist to clench down on the core itself.
Lindon felt the result as pressure more than pain, as though his heart were gripped in a vice. His first panicked reaction was to give up, take a deep breath, and try again. But if he breathed in, the madra would cycle, and he’d have to start over. So, ignoring the warning pressure, he squeezed harder.
A spike of pain shot through the right side of his stomach, leading to a tingling, freezing cold that danced over his skin. But now, when he visualized both cores, the one on the right seemed a little smaller…and a little brighter.
He took that breath now, letting the madra cycle through his body and calm his nerves, then he clenched down again. The pain was sharper now, the spasm longer, the cold on his skin lingering. Wind pressed even sharper against him thanks to his sweat, which flooded out as though he’d sprung a leak.
“Yeah, you’ve got ahold of it now,” Yerin said, her excited voice close to his ear. He almost lost his concentration. “Keep ahold of it. I knew a man who stopped midway, and his organs—”
She cut off in a rustle of cloth and a whispering rasp that said she’d stood up and drawn her weapon, and Lindon’s eyes almost opened before he forced them shut again. The core he’d compressed was fluctuating now, beating in an irregular rhythm, and it took all his concentration to wrap another layer of madra around it.
He could feel that she was right, though she’d cut off before the important part. He tried not to listen to her footsteps as she padded around him, facing some danger. If he left his core alone, it would go wild in his body. In the worst case, it could tear him apart from the inside.
He flexed his madra again, and the core reduced in size by another layer. He shivered as icy needles pricked him all over, this time even in the depths of his ears, under his fingernails, in the back of his eyes. He shuddered, but forced his breathing to stay steady. Though he had never followed a Path, he’d practiced his cycling technique for years. His madra didn’t slip.
After the pain in his ears, he heard nothing but a high-pitched whine, though he felt the impact in the ground as something landed next to him. Once again, he focused completely on his core.
If it had been the size of his fist before, now it was only as big as Suriel’s marble, and brighter. The larger core seemed hazier by comparison, less substantial, as though it were half a dream. The Copper core was brighter, more vivid. He hardly had to work at all to visualize it, floating inside him like a star.
Once he’d wrapped it more thoroughly in a tight fist of madra, he squeezed one final time. Yerin’s voice came to him then, though she sounded so distant that he couldn’t make out her words, and he couldn’t be bothered to spare the attention anyway. His whole body stung and tingled, more painfully than before, until each of his muscles twitched. His core was resisting this time, like a nut unwilling to crack, and he had to bend all of his will and all his madra to push.
His core snapped down to a tiny pinprick of light, and he shuddered violently. An icy hand slapped the back of his skull, and he passed out.
He woke only an instant later, or so it seemed to him. The fire flickered with sullen red light, just as it had the last time he’d seen it, and its heat lay on him like an oppressive blanket. He began to move away, only to come to two startling discoveries.
First, as he lay sprawled out on the ground, his injuries should have been torturing him. He’d spent the last four nights snatching only the occasional handful of sleep because of the pain in his back, his ribs, his limbs. All that was gone, replaced with an unsteady weakness, as though he’d slipped into someone else’s body. Despite the occasional cold tingle across his skin, just like the ones he’d sensed while advancing, he felt whole.
Second, there was something wrong with the fire. Spectral red lights drifted around the blaze in an orbit, like flames that had left their candles behind, growing in number at the center of the heat. He had to focus strangely to see the phantom campfire; it felt more like watching his core than something physical, as though he saw with his spirit instead of with his eyes.
Even when he moved his gaze away, the world was awash in color. The ground beneath him ran with veins of bright yellow as far down as he could see, each wriggling slowly like lightning trapped in jelly. He was seeing through the ground itself somehow, which gave him a dizzying impression like he was trapped on the outer membrane of an endless ocean, and he could fall through any second.
The logs in the fire sprouted phantom limbs of green that slowly blackened as they burned, and a furious red current ran beneath his own skin, as though his blood had started to glow.
He tried to sit up, but instead he curled like he’d pulled the wrong string on a puppet. After a few awkward attempts, he finally flopped one arm underneath him and pushed up, muscles trembling. He had to fight his way up to a seated position.
He felt as though he’d wrung out each of his muscles like dishrags, but advancing usually left a sacred artist immobilized for a while. He’d recover soon.
Above all, the weakness was proof that he’d made it. He was Copper. By all reason, Copper should be the first, unremarkable step on anyone’s journey, but he felt as though he’d been climbing a mountain for his entire life and only now had reached a ledge.
The thought of Copper sparked a memory, and he snapped his head up again, sparkling with excitement. If the biggest advantage of Copper was the ability to cycle vital aura from heaven and earth, that meant…
The bright ghosts of his surroundings had vanished. It was easy to lose sight of them if he wasn’t focusing, as though they only existed when he held his eyes a certain way. As soon as he concentrated, looking beyond, the vivid phantoms returned.
The floating red flames in and around the campfire felt as though they meant heat, like they were symbols written in a language he had just learned how to read. When he realized what he was looking at, his heart leapt in pure joy.
This was fire aura. He’d always wondered what it looked like. This was the power that everyone absorbed and Rulers controlled.
He corrected himself before his thoughts had gone too far: out here, anyone could learn Ruler techniques. It had nothing to do with your birth. Everyone was a Ruler, and a Forger, and so on, but no one was Unsouled. The possibilities were dizzying.
He still didn’t understand some basic mysteries—his family harvested light aura, not fire, but he didn’t know how to spot the two, much less tell them apart—but the fact remained that he could see aura all around him. With training, he could draw the aura into his own madra, changing its nature and adding to its power.
The key to true strength lay all around him; he was awash in an infinite ocean of treasure.
He clawed for his pack, ready to write down his impressions before he forgot them. He pulled out a loosely bound bundle of yellowed papers that had once been nothing more than the technique manual for the Heart of Twin Stars technique. Now it was his instruction manual for the Path of Twin Stars.