Ziel pushed himself up from the ground, rolling up a tiny scroll. He had copied some of the runes himself. “It’s definitely going to get stronger. Let’s get deeper while we’re still fresh.”
“Thank you!” Mercy cried. “Whatever we do, we need to move.”
Lindon nodded and led the way to the tunnel the hand had indicated.
Until the tunnel vanished.
He sensed something, and it felt similar to the substance he pushed through to create a portal. Like he was feeling the fabric of space itself.
Now there was only a blank stretch of wall where a tunnel had been a moment before.
Everyone except Lindon and Eithan put their guard up at the sudden shift, including Little Blue. Lindon looked around for the entrances; if they had all vanished, they were going to need to find a way to break through this stone before they died here.
There were still two entrances left. The hall they’d come from had vanished, just like the one they had been headed into. Now there was one entrance against the right wall, and one in the ceiling.
The ceiling tunnel was marked with the image of a coiled, serpentine dragon, and the entrance in the right wall bore another symbol of the Arelius Patriarch.
Ziel leaned against his hammer and sighed. “They can manipulate space. Great. I should have known.”
“Think of it this way,” Eithan said. “We have so much to learn!”
Once more, Lindon brought out the hand.
In the headquarters of the Twin Star Sect, on the edge of Serpent’s Grave, Jai Long completed his morning cycling. This aura chamber was perfect for him, having once belonged to the Jai clan; it was filled with glowing blades that saturated the air with the power of light and swords.
He couldn’t replenish the animating force of the snake that brought all his techniques to life, but that resource seemed inexhaustible. Jai Long only wished it would one day leave his madra, no matter that his entire fighting style was now based around it.
He wrapped the bands of scripted red cloth around his face with practiced motions before he unlocked the chamber door, and found Wei Shi Kelsa waiting for him on the other side.
Just like the rest of her family, she was tall and intense, but where Lindon tended to look like he was contemplating a murder, Kelsa gave off the impression that she was always giving you one hundred percent of her attention. No matter what was happening.
“Kelsa. Is something wrong?”
“I thought you might want to train together,” she said. A fox’s tail of purple-white foxfire lashed behind her. Her Goldsign.
She saw him glance at it, and her gaze darkened. “I still hate it.”
“It could be worse,” Jai Long said.
“It’s not practical, even if it can burn people. Snowfoxes have claws and teeth. I could have gotten those.”
Jai Long began to walk away from the Stellar Spear aura chamber, and she fell into step beside him. As every morning, there was a decent-sized crowd on the path leading to the various aura chambers. Morning cycling was a common practice.
“Not every Goldsign is practical.”
“Why not? It isn’t fair that some people should have extra weapons growing from their body, while others have useless decorations.”
“Even without Goldsigns, some people have longer reach with their swords, or learn techniques faster. The world isn’t fair.”
Jai Long had bitterly resented the unfairness of Goldsigns for years, so he had accepted the truth of it more thoroughly than anyone else.
Kelsa scowled about it, though she didn’t argue. It was a mark of her familiarity with him that she was complaining about this to his face at all; shortly after her advancement, she hadn’t said a negative word about his Goldsign for fear of offending him.
He didn’t mind. If anything, having the worst Goldsign in the world made him empathize more.
“You didn’t answer me,” she said abruptly. “Do you want to train together?”
“Why do you have to make it a formal invitation? It doesn’t make much difference if we train together or separately.” There was enough of a gap in their advancement, and enough of a difference in their Paths, that there weren’t many benefits they could offer one another.
“It’s romantic,” she responded. Jai Long missed a step, but she gave him a confused look. “What? I told you I was interested in you.”
“People don’t normally do that,” he said. Not just say exactly what they meant with zero subtlety, but also express interest in him. No one had done that since he had botched his advancement to Lowgold when he was a child.
“Most people like to waste time.”
Jai Long had a knot of complicated emotions to untangle, but he knew how to control himself under pressure. And he was interested. Potentially.
“If you wanted to spend some time together, we don’t have to train. There’s a new—”
“What do you mean?” she interrupted. “Training together is romantic.”
Jai Long stared blankly at her. Training was boring and repetitive work.
As he did, he felt a light touch brush across his perception, and he realized there had been a web of madra strands observing him for a while.
He glanced to his left and saw his sister smiling as she walked up to him. Fingerling was coiled onto her shoulder. She dipped her head as she reached Kelsa.
“Apologies,” Jai Chen said, which made Jai Long think they’d been around the people of Sacred Valley for too long. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
Kelsa looked from her to Jai Long, studying his eyes. “Your brother doesn’t think training together is romantic.”
“It isn’t,” he said.
“Jai Chen, what do you think?”
His sister cupped her chin and gave the question far more consideration than it deserved. “I could see that, I think. It’s personal, intimate. One-on-one. You’d have to be with the right person, though.”
Kelsa looked to him triumphantly, but now he only thought they were both crazy. He may have been out of his depth with this subject, but he had observed others. Training was just…work.
Unwittingly, he thought of Lindon. The twenty-year-old Sage who used his free time to train more.
Maybe something ran in the family.
Jai Chen gave a sharp gasp, and he immediately stretched his perception out to her. Even with the support of the sect, she’d had a difficult time reaching Lowgold. There weren’t any Remnants with her unique blend of aspects, not to mention any appropriate scales.
But since she had, her detection web had become easier to use and far more efficient. As a Truegold, his spiritual perception was naturally far beyond hers, but she could sense physical changes far faster than he could.
It didn’t take long before everyone saw what she had. A thin pillar of shadow stretched into the sky behind Jai Long. He couldn’t feel it with his perception—it was veiled somehow, or maybe just beyond his ability to detect—but he certainly felt the power of the one stepping through it.
Underlord.
So this was a portal of some kind. Without discussion, the three pushed toward the black beam stretching into the sky. Of course, they weren’t the only ones.
And a moment later, that was proved unnecessary, as a Truegold woman in the green armor of the Skysworn drifted up on a Thousand-Mile Cloud. The Underlord, whoever it was, remained on the ground.