Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

19

TO CONFUSE

JIEYUAN

—∞—

What in the Heavens?

It was like he’d hit a roadblock not even a step past the starting line.

He quickly scanned through its contents, but it was all just more of the same, utterly unreadable text. Like it was in a different language. Which was very much curious, because at least in his current life, he’d never heard about there being other languages. He reckoned he would’ve been even more confused if Amyas hadn’t been familiar with the concept.

“What’s wrong?”

He opened his eyes, saw Meiyao looking at him curiously, and tossed her the jade book. “Have a look.”

Not even a moment later, she let out a little, “Ah.” Then she opened her eyes. “This is in Liangshibai code. It’s something the Liangshibai use to encrypt some of their jade books, those they want to protect from outsiders. Which is pretty much anything related to the Gleamstone Valley. I should’ve expected this.”

“So we can’t read it?”

“I know some of it,” Meiyao said. “Aunt Yuyan taught me the basics. Give me a moment. I’ll see what I can figure out.”

Then she was reading the jade book again, eyes closed. Jieyuan waited, and as he kept his eyes on her, saw her brows furrow in what looked like deep concentration. It was a good while before Meiyao looked up at him.

“I think I’ve gotten what I can out of it,” Meiyao said, opening her eyes. Her frown hadn’t left her face, though. Jieyuan leaned forward. “It’s not much. I don’t know enough of the code to decipher everything, and it seems to me like Yuanzhi wrote a lot of it in a hurry. It’s sloppy. Some parts of it are jumbled. But… Well, it seems like she went to the Gleamstone Depths.”

Probably noticing the lack of comprehension that should’ve made its way to his face, Meiyao elaborated, “Right. That’s another sort of secret of the Liangshibai Clan. It’s the underground of the Gleamstone Valley. At the center of Gleamstone Forest, there’s a fissure called the Gleamstone Maw that leads to the Depths. The Liangshibai don’t let anyone inside the Depths—or even get anywhere close to the Maw. The Liangshibai Clan view it as a hallowed ground, and only Liangshibai are permitted inside.”

“Hallowed ground…” Jieyuan had always thought the Liangshibai seemed rather cultish when it came to their obsession with gemstones—and in particular gleamstone. But he’d never heard about them having a specific faith, and the Gleaming Stone Sect, at least, was secular. “And what’s there?”

“I don’t know. Even Yuyan didn’t want to tell me much more than that. According to the jade book, though, it seems like it’s all gleamstone, just like the Valley, and with more gleam beasts. And something happened to her there—that’s one of the muddled parts—that both caused her to start turning into gleamstone and Gleaming End to advance to Orangesoul. So Yuanzhi made her way back to a cave she’d secretly made in the Flaw long ago, to see if she could somehow revert or at least stop the crystallization. The last few brief notes on it are another muddled mess, but… well, I guess we already know what the outcome was. I think she threw the jade book away, at the very end, so it wouldn’t be converted to gleamstone together with everything else on her.”

“So… as long as we stay off the Gleamstone Depths, we should be fine?” That seemed, to him, like the lesson to be learned there.

“I’ve never heard of someone turning to gleamstone before, so I think so, yes.”

“All right.” Jieyuan glanced down at the gleamstone floor, and then at the glowing crystal undergrowth and trees around them. He still wasn’t comfortable around it all, not anymore, but it was nothing he couldn’t live with. “Anything else?”

Meiyao glanced back down at the jade book. “I’m not sure. Protector Yuanzhi mentions that she burned her soul at the end. And that she ignited it. She actually brings that up a couple of times. But I don’t know what that’s about.” She paused like she’d just recalled something. “Protector Yuanzhi had a reputation for being obsessed with Firesouls. It almost always came up, when Grandfather talked about her. That might have to do something with it.”

It didn’t ring any bells for Jieyuan, either—not that he’d expected it to, considering Meiyao would know much more about matters of cultivators than he did—but there was something Meiyao had said that did catch his attention. “Grandfather?” Meiyao’s father, the sect leader, was a mundane-born, and he hadn’t found anything on her mother or where she’d come from.

Meiyao blinked at him, as if confused by his question, and then narrowed her eyes. Just as she’d seemed to have clammed up—for all she raged at Daojue’s secrecy, she sure had lots of secrets herself—she sighed. “Zhaoyong. Chief Protector Zhaoyong.” She looked off, suddenly rather distant. “He’s not my grandfather, technically. Not by blood. But he’s like one in every other sense. Or, well… I used to think he was.” And then she was scowling, her face darkening.

Jieyuan recalled what Yunzhu had said, about Meiyao’s father and Yunzhu’s grandfather—which might as well as be Meiyao’s grandfather too—doing something, and how that was what had caused their fallout. It didn’t look as if Meiyao would be receptive to any more prodding, though, so he let the matter die.

“Anyway, that’s about it,” Meiyao said suddenly, tossing the jade book back to him. “Like I said, we shouldn’t be at any risk, at least not from the Gleamstone Forest itself. All we really need to be concerned about are others being sent after us. And…” As luck would have it, Meiyao’s eyes landed on Daojue, who had already finished wrapping Gleaming End with the gear-shroud and was meditating silently not too far from them. “There are some things still left unanswered, however.”

Meiyao made to stand up. Jieyuan decided he’d had enough of this. She was halfway up when he said, “Remember our fight with the gleam wolves?”

Meiyao didn’t take her eyes from Daojue, now fully standing. “What about it?”

“Remember how I looked over your way at the end? And how I saw some things?” Namely, Meiyao glowing green and being surrounded by some red haze. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but Daojue isn’t the only one keeping secrets here.”

Frozen now, Meiyao stared at him, her eyes first widening, then narrowing. “You… No, that’s different—”

“Is it?” Jieyuan challenged. And he held her stare.

Meiyao worked her jaw silently, her eyes flitting back and forth between him and Daojue, before she finally slumped and plopped back down on the ground. Then, wordlessly, she crossed her legs and closed her eyes.

And that was that.

Sighing, Jieyuan turned back to look at Daojue. He wasn’t nearly as curious as Meiyao seemed to be, but he’d still have liked some answers. It was just that he knew well enough that there was no forcing them out of Daojue.

He found his eyes drawn to Gleaming End. Daojue had it on the ground to his left, between him and Jieyuan, with one hand resting on its shaft. And it was as he was looking at the spear that Jieyuan saw Daojue lift that hand and move it to his lap, and then use it to rub at his other hand.

And Jieyuan stared—surprised, but at the same time confused by the surprise he felt. It was like there was something out of place, like something was wrong, something to be surprised about, but he couldn’t quite tell what it was.

It took him a moment to realize it.

He’d never seen Daojue do that before. Anyone else could’ve rubbed their hands, and he wouldn’t have batted an eye. But Daojue was the sort of person who was either moving or still, no middle ground there. That meant Daojue sat like the perfect statue, always. No twitches, no involuntary, thoughtless actions or gestures. He never did anything without a purpose, without meaning.

As he looked at Daojue’s hands, he saw that it wasn’t quite his right hand Daojue was rubbing at, but a specific part of it. His forefinger. Or rather—the ring on his forefinger. It was a soft, gentle motion. Didn’t seem like Daojue realized he was doing it.

Jieyuan stared at the ring. It was a blood-red band. Matte, not metallic. From this position, he couldn’t see it clearly, but he’d seen the ring before, even noted it once. So he recalled that memory—it was from the first mission he went on with Meiyao and Daojue, when he first took the time to look Daojue over properly—and brought it to the forefront of his mind with a cultivator’s perfect recall, paying attention to the ring’s design. In it, he saw that the ring wasn’t plain. Embossed on it was some sort of design, though an intricate one that he couldn’t see quite clearly in that memory.

Pulling up a couple of other memories, from different angles and moments, he managed to conjure up a better, more detailed picture of the ring. The design on it was a six-pointed star inside a bigger, seven-pointed one. Some kind of emblem, though not one he’d ever seen anywhere else.

He’d never paid that ring all that much attention before. Many artifacts were in the form of rings, so cultivators wore all sorts of them, and to Jieyuan’s soulsense Daojue’s ring had registered as mundane, so it’d never occurred to him to think of it as anything important. But now… Didn’t he have a similar ring of his own inside his glyph-stretch pouch, a ring that also appeared mundane to his soulsense even though it was anything but? The Yikongwei Ring, gotten from Rongkai.

Also, Daojue had never done anything like that to that ring before—Jieyuan would have noticed it if he had—so that meant that something had changed. Changed recently. Today, even.

Jieyuan felt he was onto something here. Now that he thought on it, it also struck him as unlikely that Daojue—practical as he was—would bother wearing a mundane ring.

Daojue had long since stopped rubbing the ring, returning his left hand to Gleaming End, but Jieyuan’s gaze lingered on the ring for a while longer before he turned away. There was nothing he could do about his suspicions for now, but he might have found another piece of the puzzle.

Jieyuan then closed his eyes and murmured lowly to himself, “See Maeva.”

And then he wasn’t sitting cross-legged in the Gleamstone Forest any more, but in somewhere else entirely. A small but tidy room, square-shaped, with pastel white walls, one bed pressed against one wall beneath the window, facing a large bookcase filled with books. By the bookcase was a desk, and he was sitting on the chair in front of that desk, looking out the bed.

Lying on the bed, a book held up high over her, was Maeva, in her yellow sundress and lab coat.

Amyas’s sister, in Amyas’s room.

Maeva flipped a page on the book, then tossed it on the bed and rolled around to face him. “Took you long enough.” She was smiling, though.

“Maeva,” Jieyuan said. “Any thoughts on… Well, everything that just happened?”

He’d taken to Commanding her to appear like this, as a daydream, much like the battle simulations he’d been using. It saved him the trouble of having to explain to his teammates why he was talking to empty air, and he wasn’t sure how they’d take the fact that he was using his realmskill to force himself to hallucinate someone. And that was without taking into account the whole matter of Maeva having been his sister in his previous life and how in his previous life he’d lived in a completely different world.

Maeva sprung up from the bed, then began pacing around the floor. She ended up having to turn around every few steps. Amyas’s room hadn’t been exactly made for pacing. It was Maeva who’d gotten the bigger room—almost twice Amyas’s—and even after she’d moved out, their parents had kept her room prepared in case she ever came back to visit. Even though she lived with Qiyun just two houses down from them.

“Well, I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer.” As she spoke, she slowed down her pacing but didn’t quite stop it altogether. Her feet kept shifting against the wooden floor. Maeva’d never been able to stay put for any length of time, not when thinking. Needed to get all the yummy brain juices flowing properly, she’d say. “You do know that, from a practical perspective, it makes much more sense to head back to the Outer Forest and try to call an elder over, right? In that case, there’s only the possibility they’ll be against you—whether if you stay here, it’s pretty much guaranteed more people will come after you.”

“I know,” Jieyuan said. He’d suspected she’d start with this. “It’s just…”

“You don’t want to get someone else to solve the problem for you. You want to stay and fight.” Maeva sighed. “It’s like you’re a kid who’s been handed a gun and now thinks he can take on an adult. You were already bad enough as Amyas, and now I swear you’re even worse. And your two teammates aren’t any better.”

Jieyuan said nothing. He looked past her, and on the window over his bed he caught his faint reflection. It gave him a pause. Short blond hair and blue eyes. Thinly built, if not scrawny. Dark bags under his eyes. A rather large nose. Thin lips.

He looked away. He hadn’t realized he took on Amyas’s appearance in this place.

Maeva was looking at him, thoughtful now and oddly still. But when he turned fully back to her, she resumed pacing. “Anyway, there’s not much to say on the matter of Yuanzhi’s jade book, either. You had the right of it, I think. Just stay away from the Gleamstone Depths. But what you saw there at the end, with Daojue’s ring… I agree with you. The ring’s important. Especially that design on it. Keep an eye out for it in the future. See if you can find it somewhere else.”

Then she tilted her head to the side. “You know, I think you should try using your realmskill to bring up Qiyun. He’d be able to come up with all sorts of theories, I think. This kind of thing was his bread and butter.” She scrunched up her nose. “I never thought I’d say this, but it seems like his obsession with that garbage he called literature might actually come in handy. Even if he only has your memories to work with.”

Jieyuan considered it. For just a moment, he imagined what kind of Qiyun’s reaction would be to this whole situation. And he immediately shot the idea down. “Hard pass.”

Maeva raised an eyebrow.

“These hallucinations are based on the real thing, right? Based on how I think you and Qiyun would react? Well, I already know what your husband would do. What he’d say. He’d refuse to cooperate and spend the entire time whining about how it was me that ended up reincarnating in a world like this and not him.”

“Come on. He wasn’t that bad.”

“Maeva, you had him as your husband,” Jieyuan said. “I had him as my brother-in-law. The Qiyun you know isn’t the one I did. With you, he had to play nice to get into your pants. With everyone else? The man was an absolute pest.”

She frowned. “You two got along just fine.”

“When you were around,” Jieyuan said. “And sometimes even when you weren’t. But trust me, if I were to call him now, and he’s anything like the real thing, all he’ll give is a headache. Didn’t you have access to my memories? Look through them and tell me I’m wrong.”

Maeva was still frowning, but she didn’t press the issue. They talked a while longer, but he eventually called it off, cutting off the Command and snapping back into his body.

He didn’t have quite the luxury of… spending time with his hallucination of the sister he had in his previous life. Thinking of it this way brought a grimace to his face—it was weird in ways he didn’t even want to touch upon—but it helped distance himself from Amyas’s feelings that always seemed to come over him when he talked with Maeva.

No, all the time he had, he needed to spend it on improving himself, on getting stronger. Especially given the circumstances he was in now. So he used Absolute Will Command this time and closed his eyes, but it wasn’t in his room he appeared now, but in a clearing in the Gleamstone Forest, and across from him wasn’t Maeva, but Daojue.

And Jieyuan prepared himself to die, over and over again.

—∞—

It was the twenty-ninth of Yellowfull, the penultimate day of the Outer Hunt, they hadn’t been attacked yet, and Jieyuan wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.

Stifled was a possibility. Pent-up, too. Even disappointed. Mostly, though, he was tired.

The three of them were wandering around the Forest, Meiyao at the lead. The sun had only just risen. Although they’d decided to stay in the Third Ring, they didn’t know how or if they were still being tracked, so they’d taken to moving to a different location every day, just in case.

Thirteen days. That was how many days they’d spent on full alert, and with every day that an attack didn’t come, they only grew more tense. By now, Jieyuan was almost hoping it’d just happen already so they could get it over with.

They had stalled in terms of cultivation. They couldn’t risk performing the imbuing ritual, not when they needed to be ready to fight at any moment, and coming out of an imbuing session would have them out of commission for at least a little while. The most they allowed themselves was Void Communion—because the alternative was sleeping, which was even worse and more time-consuming—and even then they’d decided that only one of them would do so at a time, with the other two keeping watch.

By the Heavens, Jieyuan almost missed the First Pain.

So when Meiyao suddenly stopped—somehow, she always sensed things way ahead of him—and put up her saber, what he’d felt was a surge of apprehension, but also excitement. Meiyao wouldn’t have reacted like this toward a third-sign beast now, or even a fourth-sign one. They’d hunted a bit of those while wandering around, and with the chromal gears they now had it’d barely taken a moment.

But then confusion took over when a man in citrine robes, followed by two in orange robes, stepped out from among the trees.

Not one of them wore a lightcoat—they were all disciples—and the man at the lead had a white blindfold over his face.

He’d been expecting a tenth-sign redsoul. An inner elder. Maybe even a protector. More than one of them, even.

Instead, he’d gotten Qingshi and two inner disciples. All of which should be at fifth-sign Redsoul, at most sixth-sign. And if he wasn’t sure how he felt about the lack of an attack before, he was even less sure what he felt about this new situation.

Mostly, though, he’d say he was confused, because this made no sense at all.