by Will Wight
That was Jai Long’s plan, though he had expected it to take years. He had meant to wage a long, secret war against the clan, stealing their madra and slowly advancing. Once he could face Jai Daishou as a fellow Underlord, the game would change.
With Gokren’s help, his chances improved dramatically, and his timeline shot up. He might reach the peak of Truegold before the end of the year.
“It’s still a roll of the dice for you,” Jai Long pointed out. He had to be honest with anyone willing to risk their life for him.
Gokren removed his pipe, gazing into the bowl as though it would tell him the future. “I might be gambling,” he said, “but I’d say I’m backing the favorite.”
***
On the fourth day after they left, Sky's Mercy had to duck down to the ground to let the constructs recharge. The house landed in an open field, the blue cloud slowly dying away until both Sky’s Mercy and the training barn had settled safely onto the grass.
The barn creaked and moaned as it came to a rest, but the main house remained solid and silent. Lindon was glad he’d taken Cassias’ advice and stayed out of the barn during the landing process, or he would have feared for his life.
The second they landed, everyone left the cloudship and returned to the wonderful embrace of solid ground.
Eithan allowed Gesha and Lindon to look at the scripts and constructs sustaining the giant Thousand-Mile Cloud. It was intriguingly simple. Only one circle on the bottom of the main house to guide levitation, and four pillars—one at each corner—to produce and control the cloud madra. The controls were more complicated than the actual mechanism for flight.
But the madra involved...
Both of Lindon’s cores added together would only add up to a normal Iron sacred artist, but compared to his old self, he was a powerhouse. Even so, he couldn’t activate any of the scripts involved if he drained all the madra in his body.
The house drew vital aura from the sky to keep itself powered, but it could only drain so much while in flight. Cassias activated the collection script, and ribbons of white and green aura—visible only in Lindon’s Copper sight—streamed into the four pillars of the house. The only script Lindon had ever seen consume more power was the one that had activated the Transcendent Ruins.
Lindon had peeked inside earlier, and besides the Forged madra devices that produced the cloud, each pillar held a crystal flask the size of his head. The aura ran inside those crystals, condensing and processing into the madra that powered the cloud.
It would take three days to fill up the crystals, Cassias said. He had made it to the Desolate Wilds in a month, but that had been carrying one person. Not five people and an extra building.
If they had to spend three days drawing aura for every three days flying, it would take them twice as long to return.
Eithan assured them that he intended to make it back in a month, but they would still spend one day grounded for every three in the air. No one asked him how he planned to recharge their power reserves—he was the Underlord, so he knew what he was doing.
He spread out a blanket and had a nap in the sun, but the rest of them were expected to spend the day doing chores. Lindon regarded the idea with dread: if he was hauling water or scrubbing floors, then he wasn’t training. He wasn’t getting any closer to defeating Jai Long.
But just because he wasn’t practicing sacred arts didn’t mean he couldn’t improve.
When he was sent to fill a man-sized wooden tub with water, and then bring it back to Sky’s Mercy to fill up their reservoir, he refused to Enforce himself with madra.
He didn’t know any real Enforcer techniques, but everyone used madra to reinforce their body to some degree. Cycling madra to tired limbs, focusing it to lift something heavy—Lindon had been doing that since he’d learned to walk.
This time, he kept the madra firmly in his core, relying solely on the strength of his Iron body.
Before he’d carried the tub downhill for two miles, filled it up with water, and carried it two miles back, he’d never appreciated just how heavy water could be. The tub was big enough that he could bathe in it comfortably, big enough that he looked like an ant carrying a grasshopper carcass as he made his way back. Without his Iron body, he would have collapsed halfway up, even using his madra.
He arrived red-faced and sweating, limbs shaking, and his breathing disordered. But after ten minutes of letting his Bloodforged Iron body restore his fatigue, he set off again.
This might not improve his sacred arts, but at least he could build his muscles. ‘A healthy spirit lives in a healthy body,’ as his clan used to say.
After four trips, the reservoir was full, and Gesha was impatiently waiting on him. They needed dead matter for his Soulsmith practice, so Lindon, Yerin, and Gesha went out to track and kill a wild Remnant.
Gesha found her prey within two hours, but Lindon stopped Yerin from killing it. Forcing his trembling hands to be still, he looked down on a giant frog that seemed to be made from blue-green blocks.
“Let me try first,” he said, affecting a casual tone.
Fisher Gesha’s eyebrows went up.
Yerin put her sword away. “Scream and bleed when you need help.”
Lindon learned some valuable lessons that day. First, he learned that the Empty Palm blasted a chunk out of Remnants, who were made of solid madra. That would surely come in useful later.
Second, he saw how strong Remnants were in the outside world.
Yerin was true to her word, blasting the frog into a pile of blocky dead matter the second he screamed and bled. She tied the pieces of the spirit’s corpse together and dragged the bundle back, while Fisher Gesha carried Lindon.
His Bloodforged Iron body had restored him enough that he could walk on his own by the time they reached Sky’s Mercy, though one of his cores was empty and the other only half-strength.
Back in Sacred Valley, an Iron would be enough to fight anything but a very advanced, intelligent, or strange Remnant. Those were children compared to these.
In the Transcendent Ruins, he had battled Remnants most every day for two weeks…but he hadn’t battled them, had he? Not really. He had used traps, and script-circles, and ambushes. Even when he’d personally killed a few, he had used weapons, or fought them together with Yerin and Eithan.
Now that he thought of it, this may have been the first Remnant that he’d stood and fought, relying on nothing but his sacred arts. And it had driven a two-inch spike through his calf.
It showed him how far he had to go. As though he needed another reminder.
After they’d brought the Remnant inside, the sun was setting. Eithan finally woke up, stretched, and saw that the stream of aura flowing into the four pillars had slowed to a trickle.
He opened up one of the columns at the corner of the house, revealing that the green-and-white madra swirling inside the crystal flask had only filled it a third of the way. “Good enough,” he said. “I'm on a schedule.”
Then he carefully rolled up one gilt-edged sleeve and pressed his hand to the collection script, which gathered up aura and distributed it to the four crystals.
The script took in the proper aspects of aura automatically, but it could accept virtually any madra. It would take that madra, purify it, and use it to reinforce the existing cloud madra, but the efficiency was terrible.
Thanks to Fisher Gesha's tutelage, he could calculate exactly how terrible: cloud madra was the best to fill the flasks, twice as much pure madra would achieve the same result, and any other aspect would take four times as much power to generate the cloud and lift both buildings into the air.
Eithan filled all four crystals in seconds. Dark blue clouds popped out of each of the four corners, swelling and lifting both buildings off the ground. The levitation circle on the bottom shone bright, showing that it was at capacity and ready to be used.
The Underlord shook one hand as though it had fallen asleep and then walked inside.
Cassias an
d Yerin treated this as normal, but Lindon and Fisher Gesha had exchanged astonished—and somewhat fearful—glances before heading in. Gesha had confided in him later that she, a Highgold, would have taken four or five days to fill up the circle.
Lindon wondered how long it would be before he could do something like that.
Three days later, Lindon had gained a new appreciation for elixirs.
The Four Corners Rotation Pill doubled the speed at which he cycled his madra and expanded his core, noticeably speeding his advancement. Unlike the orus fruit or the Starlotus bud, it didn’t provide much external power, but the cycling effect alone was invaluable.
When he put on his parasite ring, it usually felt like he was hanging weights on his spirit, slowing his cycling but filtering the quality of the madra. With the ring and the pill together, he could cycle at his full normal speed, but his madra would still be filtered. Twice the result for the same effort.
He brought his second core up to Iron by the seventh day, which was actually something of a disappointment.
His Copper core had compressed to a brighter, higher-quality core with ease, matching the second ball of pure madra floating in his spirit. He had confided to Yerin that he’d hoped for a second Iron body, but she’d looked at him as though he wished he’d sprouted a third eye.
“How many bodies do you have? One? Well, there you go, then.”
Eithan had been prepared to give him a pill a day, but thus far it took Lindon two days to process the energy of each pill. In a week, he’d only used three, with a bit of energy left over.
Still, that was fifteen thousand scales. He pictured the Sandviper wagon he’d seen stuffed with boxes of scales back in the Desolate Wilds, and wondered if all of those together had added up to fifteen thousand. How many scales had they mined from the Transcendent Ruins every day? It couldn’t be too much more than fifteen thousand, and that was a whole sect of Golds working together.
In the training course, he could clear six of the wooden dummies every time before he messed up: he either missed a step and took a blow or ran out of madra in one of his cores.
That wasn’t enough to dampen his enthusiasm, because he was improving. His movements were sharper and faster than they had been the week before, and his madra control was getting better. Every time he struck a target, he had to inject the exact right amount of madra on contact—too little, and the circle wouldn’t light up; too much, and the extra energy would be wasted. His Empty Palm was therefore improving by leaps and bounds, as he learned to project his madra more efficiently and precisely.
Cassias and Fisher Gesha praised his progress, but he wasn’t satisfied. After the first few days, he’d taken to wearing his parasite ring while training.
The ring was meant to be an aid in cycling to grow his core, not in combat, and it hampered his control over every Empty Palm. It was like trying to practice swordplay with a heavy rock strapped to the end of his blade, and he was tempted to tear the ring off with every strike.
But when he returned to defeating six dummies consistently, even with the parasite ring on, he finally felt as though he was making real progress.
Yerin, in her turns on the course, was frustrated that her progress using only her Goldsign was slower than Lindon’s with his entire body. She could only light up four dummies before she was forced to block a blow on her shoulder, or she injected too little madra through the silver limb and a circle failed to light.
She seemed to feel that she had fallen behind Lindon somehow, even though she had literally tied both of her hands behind her back. And she took out her frustration on him, which he felt was hardly fair. Why was it a mark against him that he was finally a little stronger than her Goldsign?
His training as a Soulsmith was still in its infancy, though Fisher Gesha tutored him every night before his evening cycling. One night, she spread seven boxes out before him, flipping open their lids and revealing seven different types of Forged madra. They were all in different forms—one a liquid, one a sludge, one a collection of irregular chunks like pebbles, one a quivering pile of glass-like shards—and each a different color.
“These are the seven most common aspects of madra, you see,” Fisher Gesha said, pointing to each in turn. “Fire, earth, wind, water, force, blood, and life.”
He had studied these aspects before. There were other types of madra that he felt should have been equally common, but these seven were most widespread because they were the easiest types of aura to cultivate. Light aura was everywhere, but it was difficult to convert to madra, and required special techniques to harvest.
The surge of pride Lindon felt when he heard that had surprised even him. His Wei clan practiced a Path of dreams and light, and now it seemed that might be an impressive combination, even by Gold standards.
“You will re-Forge each of these aspects into discs,” Fisher Gesha continued. “Solid discs, don’t just move them into a circle, you hear me? I had a disciple once…troubled girl. Anyway, reshaping madra besides your own is the fundamental skill of a Soulsmith. If you can’t do that, you can’t do anything. Bring your discs to me, and if I approve them, then we’ll try Forging them into needles.”
By then, Lindon had grown used to setting extra challenges to push himself, so he decided to skip the discs and dive straight into Forging needles.
Over the next few days, he bent all of his time and effort to the task, eventually succeeding…with six of the seven aspects.
Even water madra could be forced into a solid shape if he focused himself, though it wouldn’t stay there, but life…he spent an entire extra day focused on Forging life madra, skipping his training, before he finally gave up and returned to Fisher Gesha in shame.
“It’s impossible,” she said, eyeing his seventh box. “Life madra on its own is a liquid, and that’s the end of it. Even life Remnants are giant blobs of ooze. I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to say you couldn’t do it, hm? Thought it might get you to think about your limitations.”
She looked over the other six needles, which were supposed to have been simple discs. “Doesn’t seem to have worked, did it?”
On the night of their eighth day, he was cycling power into his core, using up the last of the Four Corners Rotation Pill before he snatched a few hours of sleep. He breathed evenly in the pattern Eithan had taught him, building up his power one step at a time and slowly pushing the bounds of his core.
After about an hour, he slowly opened his eyes.
…to see Eithan peeking in through a crack in his door.
The first few times Eithan popped up unexpectedly, Lindon’s reactions had been entertaining enough that the Underlord kept trying to catch him off guard.
But you could get used to anything if it happened often enough.
“What can I do to serve the Arelius family?” Lindon asked, rising from his bed. Eithan had done so much for him already, the least he could do in return was ignore the Underlord’s…quirks.
Eithan kicked the door open and grinned like a child playing a prank. “Cycle! Now!”
Lindon reasoned that Eithan had also earned a measure of trust, so he dropped to his knees, hands in his lap, and began to cycle. Just as Eithan had shown him in the Transcendent Ruins.
At first, every breath using this cycling technique had felt like trying to inhale water. But he’d grown so used to it over the following weeks that he rarely had to consciously think his way through the technique anymore.
Eithan tapped his fingers together as he waited for Lindon to settle into a cycling rhythm. When Lindon’s breathing evened out, Eithan’s grin broadened.
“Now,” he said, “close your eyes. I’m going to teach you a trick.”
I should trust him, Lindon reminded himself. I owe him.
Once he’d returned to the position he’d held before he was interrupted, Eithan’s voice cut in. “Madra is very responsive to your imagination. It’s part of you, just like your thoughts. So as you study more advanced techniq
ues, you’ll find that holding a clear mental picture is just as important as moving your madra in certain patterns.”
That fit Lindon’s experience. As he advanced, his madra was easier to visualize, and he was better able to get the power to do what he wanted without forcing it into a pattern.
“I’m going to teach you a cycling technique. Once you’ve mastered it, this method will take you to Jade and beyond.”
Lindon leaned forward eagerly, eyes squeezed shut, suddenly afraid to miss a word.
“This is a technique for processing your madra, not for battle,” Eithan went on. “If you try to fight while cycling like this, you might as well tie your ankles together.”
Lindon wondered if he should be taking notes.
“In your mind, focus on your core. Ah, I mean one core. Pick one.”
The core that had reached Iron first was brighter and more solid than the other, so he focused on it, letting the bright blue-white ball fill his vision as the other one fell behind into irrelevance.
As he breathed, his madra cycled, spinning out from his core to run out to the rest of his body and then swirling back.
“Your core is made of stone. Picture it as a huge, stone wheel. It’s all you can see. It’s like a wall of heavy, solid stone.”
Lindon focused on that image, superimposing it over the blue-white sun.
“Now, as you exhale and cycle madra through your body, the stone grinds away at the edges of your core. It’s heavy, and it rolls slowly, pushing your core outward.”
That was harder to hold. Madra usually flew out from his core freely, but he had to slow it down, forcing his core to rotate and running power through it a scant inch at a time.
He felt like he was pushing that stone wheel up a hill with all his strength, all while trying to keep madra from slithering through his grip. If he lost concentration for one second, the strings of madra would escape and the wheel would fall back down, crushing him.
The effort of moving his madra in such an unnatural pattern caused his channels to strain, as his spirit groaned under the effort. Sweat dripped over his eyelids as he concentrated, and each exhalation was agonizingly slow.