Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

18

SO IT GOES

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan had spent fifteen nights in the Gleamstone Forest. The first handful or so of them, he’d been tense, on edge, and it’d been a rather unfortunate confluence of factors that had led to that less-than-pleasant experience.

One was that, new as he’d been to the forest and unused to its particular brand of bizarre beauty, the nighttime darkness seemed to him to elevate the Gleamstone Forest’s glowing, crystalline eeriness to greater, more chilling and unsettling heights. Another was the looming possibility of gleam beasts—particularly ones that, like the trio of onyx gleam wolves they’d faced in the Second Ring, were where they had no business being—wandering his way and catching him unawares. And then there was the whole situation between Meiyao and Daojue, which had been so tense that every time Jieyuan went into Void Communion he’d wonder if, when he came out of it, he’d find that one of his teammates had killed the other.

Over the next few days, though, Jieyuan grew used both to the glowing, kaleidoscopic living crystals that comprised the Gleamstone Forest and to the idea that a gleam beast could pop up uninvited at any moment. Meiyao had also cooled off some, and though she did not entirely give up her feud with Daojue, she’d settled for ignoring their indifferent teammate, which was already a marked improvement. And so Jieyuan had ended up adapting, falling into a rhythm, and before he knew it he was just about at ease about the whole situation.

None of that was the case anymore—somehow, it’d all come undone in the span of only a few hours, all the progress he’d made being wiped away as easily as lines on sand—and Jieyuan would say the coming night, his sixteenth night, would be the worst one yet. And from the look of things, the nights that’d follow didn’t promise to be any better.

Jieyuan was crouched on the ground. Lying beside him now was Weiming’s glyph-stretch pouch, drawn fully open, and he had one of his arms inside it, pulling out the items inside one by one and depositing them on the ground in front of him.

He’d placed himself between Daojue and Meiyao—in this case, physically and figuratively. The whole feud between Meiyao and Daojue? It was back. Full force. With a vengeance. And he reckoned that just about the only thing staying Meiyao’s hand, besides his physical presence between the two, was that she probably knew—at some level, one she’d probably sooner die than admit to—that they’d be better off with Daojue around if they were attacked.

And an attack was very much a possibility. The other two jade books had similarly been busts, meaning they were no closer to knowing how Weiming had tracked them down, why she’d been after them, or who else was involved in this matter.

They’d be remaining in the Third Ring until the end of the Outer Hunt. That’d been pretty much the only thing Meiyao and Daojue had been able to agree on, though purportedly for entirely different reasons, and in entirely different ways. Daojue had simply given him one of his long, silent stares when he’d asked whether they’d be better off staying here or returning to the Outer Forest and trying to signal an elder over. To similar effect, Meiyao had argued that if the Geshihan Clan was involved, it was likely that the elders overseeing the Outer Forest were also compromised, and that the only elder she knew was guaranteed to be on their side was her step-mother and overseer of the Outer Hunt, Protector Yuyan, someone they’d only be able to reach the day the Outer Hunt ended and everyone gathered at the entrance of the valley to head back to the sect.

Jieyuan had his suspicions that, deep down, Meiyao’s reasons for voting to stay and fight weren’t that different from what he imagined Daojue’s to be. That Meiyao didn’t want to run off to an elder and have them solve this issue for them. That she wanted to face this head-on. There was such a thing as a cultivator’s pride, and Jieyuan was hardly a stranger to it, himself. He did agree with his two teammates, after all. Between Gleaming End and Meiyao’s Radiant Light Haven talisman, they should be able to figure something out.

It was after that they’d decided they’d be staying that the situation had devolved, and what a downward spiral it’d been.

Meiyao was standing to his left, arms crossed, alternating between glaring at Daojue and then at anywhere but Daojue. To his right, Daojue was standing, holding Gleaming End upright, and paying Meiyao no mind whatsoever. Instead, he seemed to be entirely occupied with staring at Gleaming End, as he’d been for a long while now.

Jieyuan already found it hard to understand whatever it was that went on inside Daojue’s head at the best of times, and right now he was drawing hard blanks. Had it been anyone else, Jieyuan would have thought they were simply excited about their admittedly very handy new weapon, but he just couldn’t imagine Daojue getting worked up over something like that.

He didn’t think too much about it, though, being mostly concerned with Meiyao. Right now she seemed to be restraining herself, but just a while ago she’d been about to tear into Daojue—who, exactly as Jieyuan had suspected he would, had fended off all his and Meiyao’s questions on how he’d found the cave and bonded Gleaming End with steely silence.

Meiyao… hadn’t taken that well, and Jieyuan had the impression it wasn’t just Daojue’s utter lack of cooperation that bothered her, that she also wasn’t overly fond of mysteries and secrets, particularly those being kept from her. But he’d successfully redirected her attention to the matter of Weiming’s belongings.

“And that’s about it,” Jieyuan said, as he set down the last of Weiming’s belongings—a sixth-sign scabbard—on the ground, placing it beside the finesaber he’d removed earlier from the pouch. He stood back up. “How do you two want to do this?”

Both Daojue and Meiyao looked down at the assortment of items laid out on the ground. It was quite the haul. Made what he’d gotten from Rongkai after the whole debacle in the Fatebloom Woods look like a pauper’s treasure.

Besides the sixth-sign glyph-stretch pouch he’d just been handling, there was the sixth-sign sheathe, a seventh-sign saber, the sixth-sign gear-shroud that had been wrapped around it and was now rolled up in the ground, seventh-sign fullgreaves and fullgauntlets, and a small pile of shards. Not to mention Weiming’s red skill seed, which based on the gleamstone barrier she’d summoned earlier, should be the Gleaming Stone Containment realmskill.

A windfall, no matter how you looked at it—but not necessarily as big of one as it could’ve been. And as he looked at it now, spread out in front of him like this, Jieyuan frowned. “You know, I’d have expected a bit more from an inner elder. Let alone a noble one.”

“No, this seems right,” Meiyao said. She picked up the saber and looked it over. “Weiming was young, remember? She’d probably only just reached tenth-sign. And she wasn’t from the core bloodline of the Geshihan Clan.”

“But no cloudcraft? I thought all elders had one.” Cloudcrafts, when not in use, took the form of bracelets of very hard, condensed chromal silk. He’d already noted its absence when they’d been packing away Weiming’s things, but he still couldn’t help but comment on it. It would’ve made their lives much easier, giving them the option to just fly out of the forest. As much as Jieyuan was prepared to stand his ground with his teammates, cultivator’s pride and all, he’d have at least liked to have the option of an easier way out of this mess.

“Most cloudcrafts belong to the sect,” Meiyao said. “They’re just loaned out to elders as needed. And whatever Weiming was doing here, I doubt it was a sect-sanctioned affair. Even if turns out she was supposed to be our watcher, I imagine she wouldn’t have been spared one, since she’d have only needed to follow us, and the other elders supervising the Hunt from above would need them more.”

“Yunzhu had one. And she’s a disciple.” Admittedly, a core disciple—a junior protector—but still a disciple. An elder was still supposed to rank above her. “Unless her visiting Daojue was a sect mission.”

“She’s a Liangshibai from the core bloodline.” Meiyao held the saber still in her hands for a moment, then gave it a swing, then two. “The high clans all have cloudcrafts of their own, which are divided between its members. Normally, she wouldn’t have gotten one, however. It’s mostly because of who her mother is. Even my brother doesn’t have one.” She turned back to him. “I’m keeping the saber.”

“Sure,” Jieyuan said. She was the only saber user among them. “Does it have a prime gear-skill?”

“No.” Meiyao picked up its sheathe, which was a sixth-sign artifact all on its own. “I think Weiming had the gear-shroud on it mostly as a bluff.”

Jieyuan glanced down at the gear-shroud, then at the saber, then to Daojue and… the very precious spear he was holding. “In that case, you can probably leave it bare. So… Daojue, you take the gear-shroud and wrap it around Gleaming End.”

Meiyao pursed her lips, but said nothing. Daojue stared down at the bandage-like pile of tin cloth on the ground for a moment, then picked it up. Good to see he was playing nice. With the gear-shroud, if more people came after them, they wouldn’t be able to tell Gleaming End’s true soulsign—or rather, its seeming absence of soulsign—and that was just the kind of deadly surprise they would be able to take advantage of in a fight. One of the properties of gear-shrouds was that they were physically intangible while in use, so Gleaming End would be able to cut just fine with it on.

“I’d like the armor,” Jieyuan said. Daojue had Gleaming End, and Meiyao had her new saber. He was currently the only one without the means to do damage to a tenth-sign redsoul, and that didn’t sit well with him. The fullgauntlets and fullgreaves were plain metal pieces similar to the ones he had on, and he had already searched them with his soulsense earlier and knew they didn’t have prime skills, but their soulsign alone would go a long way. “Any issues?”

Neither Daojue nor Meiyao said anything, so that was that. The shards they split between them, and Meiyao claimed the sixth-sign glyph-stretch pouch for herself. Daojue ended up with just the gear-shroud, but considering he’d gotten an Orangesoul spear out of this mess—the spear’s realm was just about the only information Daojue had deigned to share with them—Jieyuan thought that was plenty fair. As for the red skill seed, it’d gone to him, though Meiyao advised him that if they ended up bringing this whole matter to the sect later, they’d probably want the skill seed back.

According to her, they’d also definitely want Gleaming End back, too, what with it being the heirloom artifact of the sect, even more so now that it was at Orangesoul, but he couldn’t quite see Daojue giving it up. What’d come of that, he still didn’t know. What he did know was that at least for the time being, their chances at survival had increased considerably with all the new chromal gear they had, though it was still a long way off from certainty, and he was still back on high alert for a sudden ambush as he’d been his first few days in the forest—except this time not from a gleam beast, but from a tenth-sign redsoul.

Also like back then, his team was once again on the verge of falling apart. As Daojue moved off to the side, sitting down and starting to wrap the gear-shroud around Gleaming End, Jieyuan noted Meiyao set her jaw.

Jieyuan was quick to fish out a jade book from his robes and hold it out before Meiyao could get started on Daojue again. “There’s still the matter of this.”

That gave Meiyao a pause. “That’s… the jade book you found in Protector Yuanzhi’s cave?”

“Right,” he said, and motioned for her to sit down.

She hesitated, glancing over at Daojue again, before huffing and relenting. She dropped to the ground gracelessly, and he sat down beside her.

There wasn’t much he could do at the moment besides keeping Meiyao’s attention off Daojue until she’d cooled down, and there was similarly little left to do about others coming after them. He had hope, though, that he’d at least get to the bottom of what exactly had happened to Protector Yuanzhi and find out whether they needed to be worried about being spontaneously subsumed by the Gleamstone Forest or anything along those lines.

That hope died a very abrupt death as he sent his soulsense into the jade book, summoned its text to his mind’s eye, and was met with some unintelligible sprawl of barely recognizable words he couldn’t make any sense of.