Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

3

TO UNVEIL

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Murder, as it turned out, was mighty profitable. Assuming you could get away with it, of course. As the son of a merchant, Jieyuan had known as much since he was seven, when his father had sat him down to tell him when and how he should go about eliminating the competition, literally and figuratively. Commerce was, after all, a cutthroat business—again, literally and figuratively. Sitting in front of his desk, peering inside Rongkai’s glyph-stretch pouch, Jieyuan found that now that he was a cultivator, murder remained very much a lucrative business, if not even more so.

He was back in the sect, in the bedroom of the lodging the sect had assigned him after his induction, a squat one-story house in the Outer Court. The room was mostly bare. A small bed tucked into a corner with a chest at its foot, a desk and a chair tucked into the corner facing the bed, a small meditation mat in the middle, all of it enclosed by stone walls. Up on the ceiling was a yellow-white gemstone light, currently unlit, and just above the desk, wooden blinds partially covered a small square window, letting only a few streams of sunlight into the bedroom, but more than enough for him to see clearly.

The inside of Rongkai’s glyph-stretch pouch was bigger than Jieyuan’s old second-sign one by half. He could’ve easily fit himself inside, with some space left over, even though on the outside it was only about the size of two closed fists. Lying on the reinforced leather bottom were a pair of fullgauntlets and fullgreaves, two silver rings, a wooden ring the color of gold, two small glass pill flasks, a pile of shards, a finesword, and two jade books. That added up to Jieyuan’s biggest windfall yet—and that wasn’t even counting the violet skill seed still in his pocket.

Meiyao had been more than right when she’d said they weren’t in any trouble. An inner elder from the Justice Bureau had arrived after a while, and after asking a couple of questions, the woman had considered the matter closed, told them to hop on the cloudcraft—the cloud-like chromal silk constructs cultivators used to fly around—she’d arrived in, and flown them back to the sect. All in all, it’d barely taken a handful of minutes to settle everything. She’d let them keep everything Rongkai had on him. According to her, what happened was a clear-cut case of self-defense, so Rongkai’s belongings were theirs as the inner disciple had no family in the sect. Daojue hadn’t expressed an interest in Rongkai’s things—his teammate had barely spared it any thought before declining to take anything—so Jieyuan had only been too glad to have it all for himself. Never had he thought he’d be glad for Daojue’s arrogance and privilege, but there it was.

He’d had an idea of what he was getting—the elder had made a brief inventory of Rongkai’s things and reported it to them—but it was different now that he was actually laying eyes on the full breadth of his prize. The journey back to the sect hadn’t taken so much as five minutes—flying on a cloudcraft was an experience—and he’d have felt a tad too mercenary doing it right next to the elder, anyway.

One by one, Jieyuan removed the items from the glyph-stretch pouch and spread them out on his desk. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the violet skill seed yet, and he figured that Rongkai’s belongings might reveal some kind of clue. The two jade books looked particularly promising.

Done emptying Rongkai’s glyph-stretch pouch, Jieyuan kept it in his hands. Concentrating, eyes closed, breath steady, he willed himself back into the state of mind he’d entered at the last stage of the entrance trials, induced by the incense that Wanxin, his proctor, had burned. Heavenly Communion. He recalled exactly how he’d felt, how he was supposed to feel.

Recollection blurred into awareness as a presence brushed his mind, heavy and bright and airy. Supposedly the attention of the Heavens themselves. He still wasn’t sure if that was really what it was, no matter what the texts he’d read on the subject said, but as long as things worked as intended, he didn’t care much for the details. Together with that presence came the swollen, distracting awareness of his physical senses. The touch of his robes against his skin, the feel of breath leaving his nostrils and brushing his lips, the hardness of the chair underneath him.

He ignored it all with practiced ease and used his soulforce to channel chroma into the pouch, chanting, “Ablaze.”

The chroma he was channeling into the pouch vanished, and through his soulsense he could feel its presence change as it bonded to him. It became an extension of his body just like his attuned chroma, something he could control and move using his soulforce.

Ablaze. That one word was all it took. A heavenly hymn all on its own, just like the seven-line hymn he’d recited at the end of the sect’s entrance trials. When the elder stationed in the sect’s jade book library had shown him the sect’s Fire-aligned Redsoul harvesting, attuning, and imbuing hymns, Jieyuan had thought it was some kind of practical joke played on unwitting mundane-borns. But no, only the chromalization hymn was several lines long. Redsoul hymns of all the other types only amounted to a single line, and often just a single word.

Setting his new glyph-stretch pouch aside—because it was his now, in a way it hadn’t been before—Jieyuan considered the items spread out on his desk, taking up all of it.

The little pile of shards, loosely cluttered up in the middle of the desk, didn’t require his attention. Each one was around the size of his thumb, and were broken off from chroma prisms—ambient chroma that spontaneously underwent physicalization, except they were comprised of tenth-density chroma, whereas free-floating ambient chroma was at first-density. A shard was worth exactly one-tenth of a full prism, each containing one-tenth of a primsful of chroma. There were forty-seven of them—he’d counted as he’d taken them out of the glyph-stretch pouch—and the equation there was straightforward. The more of them he had, the better, be it for trade or cultivation.

He didn’t spare much thought for Rongkai’s finesword, either. Didn’t even reach out to hold it. It was a simple-looking weapon, slim-bladed, sleek, without frills. Just a long, straight doubled-edged steel blade and a leather-wrapped wooden hilt. A proper weapon, made for battle. His type of weapon, really. It’d have served him well enough if he’d been a swordsman. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t plan on changing that. Swords had never felt right to him. Something about them just rubbed him wrong. Even just holding one long made him feel uncomfortable and unsettled, never mind wielding one.

Leaning forward, eyes on the blade, Jieyuan tapped into his soulsense. Overlapping spiritually with the sword’s physical form was a uniform outline of it in third-shade red. The sword’s spirit-shadow, its spiritual aspect. Beasts and plants didn’t have souls like humans did. Instead, perfectly overlapping with their physical body was a spirit-shadow, which in the case of chromal beasts and plants was filled with chroma of a specific color and density. Artifacts—the most common type of chromal gear—similarly had them. He concentrated on the sword’s spirit-shadow, getting a sense of its spirit-song, its spiritual signature. Like he’d sensed Daojue’s spirit-song yesterday by focusing on his teammate’s soul, but what he perceived was nowhere as concrete.

All he got was a vaguer, looser influx of ideas and concepts. The sword’s chromal properties. Chromalization, self-sharpening. And… And that was it. The standard suite of gear-skills for chromal steel weapons. No special, nonstandard gear-skill—no prime gear-skill. Not that he’d expected any, not from a low-sign Redsoul artifact.

Pulling himself back from the awareness of his soulsense, Jieyuan considered the sword for a moment, frowning. What to do with it? He wouldn’t be using it, that much was certain. It didn’t matter that it was a stratum higher than his spear and that at the low strata the difference between soulsigns was massive. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—use swords, period. But he could see about trading it away or selling it. See if he could get a same-sign spear for it.

The fullgreaves and fullgauntlets beside the sword, though. Those were a different story. Jieyuan picked one of the fullgauntlets up, a fluid piece of scale-plated steel armor roughly shaped in the outline of an arm, hand to elbow.

He turned it over in his hands this way and that. It didn’t look much different from the ones he currently had on, maybe a bit thicker. He reached for his soulsense again, got a feel for the fullgauntlet’s spirit-song like he’d done for the finesword. Again a third-sign Redsoul artifact, no primeskill. Just the standard suit of chromal properties all fullgauntlets had. Chromalization, fluidity, self-fitting, and a couple of others he couldn’t properly define.

He returned the fullgauntlet to the desk and did the same for the other fullgauntlet and the fullgreaves, focusing on them with his soulsense. Same results. But that was fine and expected. Their higher soulsign on its own already made them a direct upgrade over his current second-sign ones, and that was plenty already. And unlike a sword, he could use them just fine, no problem whatsoever. He quickly bonded the four pieces of armor with a simple tap and an “Ablaze” each.

Next was… Jieyuan let his eyes linger on the pill flasks, the wooden ring, and the jade books for a moment, but it was the pair of silver rings that he settled on. He had a pretty good idea of what the two metal bands were already, so he’d do them first. He picked them up, turned them about in his hand. Both were plain, wide bands and pretty much indistinguishable from each other. His soulsense told another story. Their spirit-songs couldn’t be any more different. Two very different sets of chromal properties on them. One had a couple of properties he could only roughly sense that had to do with the mind and communication, whereas the other was a cleansing ring, with much simpler properties, just the standard chromalization one all chromal gears had and another property for cleansing.

The cleansing ring was at second-sign Redsoul, same as his current one, so it was another thing he’d be looking to trade or sell. The other ring, though. It was at fifth-sign Redsoul, and as far as he could tell, it was a mind-link artifact. What cultivators—those that had them, at least—used for long-distance communication, supposedly by connecting the mind of two cultivators, letting them send thoughts to each other. Because of their complexity, mind-link artifacts were at least fifth-sign. Not something outer disciples usually had, himself included. But he’d heard that everyone who made it into the Inner Court got one.

Tossing the cleansing ring back onto the desk, Jieyuan held up the mind-link ring wonderingly, and then channeled some chroma into it. Doing so, he got a vague sense of something like a list. An empty one. The cipher roster, he was pretty sure. After a cultivator bonded a mid-link artifact it would manifest a cipher—a chromal imprint specific to a pair of mind-link artifact and bond-master—and ciphers could be recorded in a mind-link artifact’ cipher roster. He wasn’t quite clear on the details, but he knew the basics of how it worked. To communicate with another cultivator, you had to have their cipher recorded in your artifact’s roster, then tap into it to start a mind-link.

He wasn’t sure if the ring’s cipher roster was empty because Rongkai hadn’t had any ciphers recorded, or because when a mind-link artifact lost its bond-master its cipher roster was similarly lost, but he reckoned it was the former. He’d heard before that though it wasn’t possible to be bonded to two mind-link artifacts at a time, it was possible to switch between them by unbonding and bonding them as needed. Doing that would be too much of a hassle if you had to fill up their cipher rosters every time you switched.

Either way, it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t like he’d expected to find incriminating evidence like Qingshi’s cipher in it. Even if he had, it’s not like he’d have been able to recognize it.

“Ablaze,” Jieyuan said, channeling chroma into the mind-link ring, bonding it, before setting it down next to the fullgreaves and fullgauntlets.

Next he picked up the two pill flasks. Both held a pair of pills. One of the flasks had two large, red-pink pills, and the other two smaller blue ones. With his soulsense, he found they were both at third-sign Redsoul, but he couldn’t tell much more than that. Like chromal gears, chromal pills had spirit-shadows, but he couldn’t tell much by focusing on their spirit-songs. He didn’t have nearly as much experience with chromal concoctions as he had with artifacts.

He held up the flask with the larger reddish pills first. Even if its spirit-song didn’t clue him in, he still had an inkling of what they were. He unstoppered the flask and took a whiff. Sure enough, he smelled a sickening saccharine. Not as strong as that of a Cultivator’s Agony pill—that was one scent he was never forgetting, that was for sure—but similar enough. The same scent he’d smelled last night.

Jieyuan stoppered the flask. He rolled the pills around in the flask, thinking. These were the modified beacon pills Rongkai had used, the ones he’d mixed with Cultivator’s Agony. Two of them. Jieyuan had never heard of such pills before, so they might be something Rongkai had come up with. Rongkai had used one on Daojue, meaning he’d had three on him when they left for their mission.

Had Rongkai been carrying these two other ones just in case, or had he been planning on using them too? What exactly had Rongkai intended for him and Meiyao? He thought on it, but drew nothing but blanks. Shrugging, he turned his attention to the other pill flask and studied the blue pills rolling around inside. Though their spirit-shadows were third-shade red, the pills were physically a mild blue, somewhere between fifth-shade and sixth-shade blue. Cultivator’s Agony antidote pills, he’d bet. He didn’t recognize them, but based on last night’s events, that should be an educated enough guess.

He placed both pill flasks next to the fullgauntlets and fullgreaves and the mind-link ring. The pills could come in handy later further down the line, so he counted them among his more useful prizes. He hesitated, then, between the wooden ring and the jade books, and ended up deciding on the former. He held up the wooden band between his fingertips, giving it a more thorough inspection than he’d given the other items so far. Unlike the metal rings, this ring was sleek, thin, and as far as he could tell, made from fatebloom wood. The color was a perfect match for it, the exact same vibrant shade of gold. But when he reached out with his soulsense, he failed to detect anything about it, as if what he was holding was just a mundane piece of wood.

That was… odd. Suspicious, even. But he put it down all the same. Now all that was left were the two small jade cubes on his desk. The jade books. Both first-sign Redsoul artifacts. If there were any clues to be found about how Rongkai got his hands on a violet skill seed, that’s where they’d be. He took hold of one of them, closed his eyes, and channeled a trickle of chroma into it. Words appeared in his mind’s eye, much firmer and clearer than thoughts, as if a book had just opened inside his head.

Quickly skimming the text, Jieyuan found it was just the refining formula for the Cultivator’s Agony Beacon pills Rongkai had used. That was nice and all, but Jieyuan didn’t know the first thing about refining—he’d been too busy playing catch-up with Meiyao and Daojue to have the time to dedicate to the chromal crafts—so he didn’t have much use for it.

He moved on to the second jade book. Moments after he began reading, he frowned, and the frown didn’t leave his face until after he was done with it. The jade book wasn’t quite what he’d been looking for, but it wasn’t exactly a bust, either. He just wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Jieyuan went over the second jade book one more time, just to be sure, before releasing it. He leaned back in his chair, thinking on what he’d read. Rongkai’s full name was Yikongwei Rongkai. Yikongwei. That wasn’t the name of any of the Gleaming Stone Sect’s adjunct clans—the clans that were part of the sect—so up to this point he’d never really paid any attention to it. He’d assumed that Rongkai was a mundane-born like himself, that the Yikongwei were a mundane family. What he’d just read put a different spin on things.

The Yikongwei, according to the jade book, had originally been a secretive chromal clan about two hundred years ago. They also had something to do with somewhere called the Heartland—where the trees were gold, with emerald roots and blood-red flowers. A place known to Jieyuan and the rest of the world as the Fatebloom Woods. The jade book claimed that the Yikongwei were behind the appearance of the Fatebloom Woods, though it wasn’t clear on how they’d pulled that off. The jade book also claimed that the clan’s founder had left his inheritance behind for his descendants in a place called the Heartseat, located in the center of the Fatebloom Woods, and that was what Jieyuan was really interested in.

There were a couple of annotations in the jade book that revealed that Rongkai was all that remained of the Yikongwei Clan in the present day and that he’d been unable to reach the Heartseat because of the fatebloom elk, which were guarding it. There were also notes on the Cultivator’s Agony Beacon pills, which Rongkai had developed to deal with the fatebloom elk. The wooden ring was also mentioned a few times. Supposedly, the founder of the Yikongwei Clan had set up a distracter inscribed field around the area that would affect anyone who wasn’t wearing the ring, turning them away.

Jieyuan held up the ring, which he now knew as the Yikongwei Ring, and scrutinized it, but just like before, nothing about it stood out to him, nor did his soulsense pick up on anything. But that lent credence to the jade book’s claim. You could only sense things at the same realm as you and lower with soulsense. Entities at a higher realm were above perception if they weren't physicalized or sufficiently stilled. And if he’d read things right, the Yikongwei Ring was chromal, but not at Redsoul.

Jieyuan had looked into the Fatebloom Woods when he was assigned the mission of picking fatebloom blossoms, and the records said that it’d mysteriously and spontaneously appeared about two centuries prior and quickly expanded to its current size before ceasing to spread. All the sects of the Radiant Gold District had sent people over to investigate, but they’d all come up empty. As the strongest cabal in the area and the one nearest to the Fatebloom Woods, the Gleaming Stone Sect had then laid claim to it, and that had been the end of it.

A distracter field could explain why nobody had been able to find anything. It distracted you so thoroughly you didn’t notice its influence, even after you were no longer under its hold. The local cabals would’ve definitely sent tenth-sign redsouls to take a look at the Fatebloom Woods, so the distracter field must’ve been at least Orangesoul to work on them. Meaning that the Yikongwei Ring had to be at least Orangesoul too to work as its key.

Well, that much was easy to put to the test.

Jieyuan closed his hand around the ring, forming a fist. He tightened his grip, putting pressure on it, and instead of being crushed, the ring dug into his palm, whole. That was proof enough. Had it been mundane, he’d have met no resistance whatsoever when squeezing through it given the chromal weight differential. He could’ve even crushed it between his fingers with virtually no effort. But he still felt the need to take it further. He drew on his aura to augment his strength, tapping into the strange pressure that had dwelt inside his muscles ever since he’d become a cultivator, a well of strength waiting to be drawn upon. And even then, wielding the strength of four men, he still felt the ring pressing against his palm, whole.

That left no more room for doubt.

Jieyuan opened his hand and looked the ring over. No signs of damage whatsoever. The Yikongwei Ring was chromal—and at least Orangesoul at that.

More than satisfied, Jieyuan set the ring back down on the table.

He’d be paying the Heartseat a visit later. Given the circumstances, the Yikongwei Clan might even have to do with whatever mysterious circumstances he and Daojue were caught up in, the Weave Mystery. And although there’d been no mention of Rongkai’s realmskill in the jade book, Jieyuan would wager good gold that it had to do with the Yikongwei Clan. To have set up the inscribed field around the Heartseat and created the Yikongwei Ring, the Yikongwei Founder must’ve been at least at Orangesoul. But if the skill seed had come from him, then what awaited at the center of the forest wasn’t the inheritance of a mere orangesoul, but that of a violetsoul.

Violetsoul. Violetsoul. Jieyuan swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. His heart hammered in his chest. Violetsoul was the last realm, the highest height a cultivator could reach. The ultimate goal. His ultimate goal. As well as something forever beyond his reach, if the sect’s jade books were to be believed.

The day after Jieyuan joined the sect, he’d paid a visit to the Outer Court’s jade book library and looked into heavenly affinity. Wanxin, his proctor for the last stage of the entrance trials, had made a big deal out of his, and so had everyone he’d met afterward, and he’d wanted to know why. Going through the sect’s jade books, he’d found out that your heavenly affinity determined not only how fast you could advance, but also to what realm you could cultivate. A fourth-order heavenly affinity meant he could cultivate to as high as Greensoul. Or, as he viewed at it, only up to Greensoul. To a Redsoul cabal where most cultivators had first-order heavenly affinity and those with second-order were a minority, Greensoul was high almost beyond comprehension. But Greensoul wasn’t Jieyuan’s goal. Violetsoul was. And to reach Violetsoul, you needed sixth-order heavenly affinity. Jieyuan was two orders short of that.

He’d spent that entire day in the library, and then another day asking around, but the consensus had been that there was no way to increase your heavenly affinity or otherwise advance beyond it. Nobody had ever heard of something like that happening. He hadn’t let his Heavens-given soulsign limit discourage him, though. As far as he was concerned, and once he reached Greensoul, he’d figure something out.

Now it looked like he could get started on that much sooner. He didn’t know what exactly he’d find in the Heartseat, but anything that concerned a violetsoul had to be significant. That was assuming the Yikongwei Founder had been a violetsoul, of course, but the more he thought on the matter, the surer of it he became. This was something much more tangible than the possible promise of power that he suspected would come from pursuing the matter of the Weave Mystery further.

Jieyuan considered everything on the desk for a moment, then held out his arms in front of him and cut off the constant trickle flow of chroma being drawn into his fullgauntlets. The two pieces of scale-plated steel armor, extending from the tip of his fingers all the way to the elbow, expanded like a lung filling with air, and then slid off his arm, hitting the table with a quiet thump, revealing the rest of the arms of the black inner robes he’d been wearing underneath. With his hands now free, he slid his new mind-link ring into the index finger of his right hand, right next to the cleansing ring on his thumb.

He repeated the process with his fullgreaves, sending a burst of chroma into the similarly scaled-plated steel armor wrapped around his knees and everything below it. Like the fullgauntlets, his fullgreaves expanded, and he stepped out of them, baring his leather boots. He then dumped his old fullgauntlets and fullgreaves and Rongkai’s finesword and cleansing ring into his old glyph-stretch pouch.

Then, instead of putting his new fullgreaves and fullgauntlets on, he stored them away in his new glyph-stretch pouch. Cultivators carried their weapons everywhere with them, but fullgauntlets and fullgreaves—which were all cultivators ever used for armor, from what he’d seen so far—you only put on when you knew you’d be needing them soon. It cost nothing to keep a weapon sheathed, but fullgauntlets and fullgreaves were a constant drain on your chroma. Their ability to hug your body like a second skin, shifting as you moved, was a gear-skill, and it continuously sacrificed the user’s chroma to maintain its effects. Even if the cost was mostly insignificant, the numbers added up over time.

Jieyuan moved everything in his old glyph-stretch pouch that he might still need—namely the little sum of shards he already had plus some jade books—over into his new one, together with the shards on the desk, the pill flasks, the wooden ring, and the jade book containing the refining formula for the Cultivator’s Agony Beacon pill. All that was left on the desk was the jade book with the information on the Yikongwei Clan.

Picking the jade book up, he eyed it briefly, considering, then closed his hand around it. Feeling the cube’s edges dig into his skin, he tightened his grip instead of relaxing. There was a cracking sound. He kept at it until his hand was a tight fist and he couldn’t feel the jade book anymore. Opening his hand, he saw that all that remained in it was a pile of little jade shards. Pretty much what would’ve happened to the Yikongwei Ring, had it been mundane. He dumped the jade dust in his old glyph-stretch pouch. Later that week, he’d bury the dust in his backyard. This whole Yikongwei matter was the kind of thing you kept to yourself, and he wasn’t taking any risks.

Now there was only one thing left to do.

Jieyuan stood up and walked over to the meditation mat in the center of his bedroom, where he sat down. He then fished the violet skill seed out of his pocket, and holding it over his lap in his closed fist, he closed his eyes and concentrated on his soulsense. He’d never seen a skill seed before, let alone held one, but he’d both heard and read plenty about them. And when you focused on one with your soulsense…

Absolute Will Command.

The words just flowed into his mind. And as they did, he started to feel things. Ideas, concepts. Authority. Control. Willpower. It wasn’t the words themselves that he perceived, but the meaning of them. Their essence. It was a much deeper experience than feeling the spirit-song of a chromal gear or pill. He felt in control, bending others to his will.

He opened his eyes, a little breathless. He held up the skill seed. Absolute Will Command. That’s what the realmskill it contained was called. And it had to do with the Concepts of Control, Authority, and Willpower. Authority most of all, making it the realmskill’s source Concept, the one Concept a realmskill was primarily derived from. Had it not already been a Violetsoul realmskill, Authority was the Concept he’d have had to pursue further down the line in order to increase its realm.

He couldn’t tell what exactly Absolute Will Command did, but what he’d sensed seemed promising.

“Subjugation of All,” Jieyuan murmured. That was the Yikongwei Clan’s verse. It’d appeared a couple of times in the jade book. Now there was no more room for doubt that the skill seed had to do with them, not with how it matched the clan’s ideals so perfectly.

Bonding a realmskill wasn’t the kind of decision you made lightly. Once you bonded one, only death would do you and it apart. Or, at the very least, that was what the sect’s jade books claimed. And you could only bond one realmskill per realm. So even at Violetsoul, you could only have at most six of them. Even if the jade books were wrong and there was a way to get rid of a bonded realmskill, he’d still be stuck with whatever realmskills he bonded for a while.

But Daojue already had a realmskill, he was sure of it. So did Meiyao, if her lack of interest in a violet skill seed was any indication. That made him the only one out of the three of them without one, and he didn’t like the sound of that. There were already plenty of ways in which he was behind the two of them. He hardly needed another.

And Absolute Will Command was a Violetsoul skill seed. That not only meant he wouldn’t have to worry about pursuing its source Concept to advance it, but that it was a realmskill a violetsoul had seen fit to use—that it was good enough for a violetsoul. And that was as ringing an endorsement as they came.

It was, in fact, all he needed to know.

Jieyuan channeled chroma into the skill seed. He was still in Heavenly Communion, and sitting down like this, concentrating, he could feel his heightened senses much more keenly. He pushed all those unwanted sensations to the back of his mind and focused on the skill seed in his hand, into which he was still channeling chroma. He concentrated on it until he could visualize it in his mind’s eye. Once he had a clear image of the skill seed, he pictured it merging into his body, willing it into himself, making clear his intention to assimilate it.

Bonding a realmskill was like a chromal ritual, and intent was key in a ritual, so soon enough he should—

A profound sense of weightlessness came over Jieyuan, and he opened his eyes without really thinking.

He wasn’t in his bedroom anymore. In front of him, both impossibly distant and within arm’s reach, was a vast, starry sky—an ocean of silver orbs lighting up a fathomless black void.

Jieyuan knew what was happening, the significance of it, but there wasn’t any weight behind that knowledge. His thoughts felt faint, intangible, barely causing any ripples in the serenity that now suffused his mind. His emotions, borderline nonexistent. All he felt was a vague, illusory notion of awe at the realization that he was looking at the Heavens themselves. That each of those silver stars was one of the Laws that governed reality.

His gaze drifted down, and he saw himself, red-robed, sitting cross-legged beneath the starry sky. Like the Heavenly Vault above, his body seemed both far away and just within reach.

From the top of his head sprouted a long, silver line. It shot upwards like a bamboo sprout, and upon reaching the sky it split into countless little lines, each of them connecting to a silver star. Like branches, the lines kept spreading, extending, and soon the stars were starting to look like little silver leaves, and the original line extending from his head like a trunk.

The moment the image of a tree was complete, stretching out from his body and wearing the sky and stars as its crown, Jieyuan found himself back in his bedroom, staring at a blank stone wall.

For one uncomprehending moment, he sat there, struck dumb. Then his mind kicked into high gear, and he let out a slow breath. He’d heard of the vision people saw when assimilating a skillseed—the vision of the Heavenly Vault—but he hadn’t thought it’d be so intense.

He looked down at his hand. The skillseed was gone. He could also feel something inside himself. Not that heavenly presence—he wasn’t Communing anymore—but something slighter. Something that felt like a part of him. Something natural, like another limb, one he couldn’t see but still control.

And with it came information. Not a surge of it, nothing he’d need to go over and assimilate. This bit of knowing was already part of him, already known. After what had gone down with Amyas’s memories last night, he much appreciated the lack of head-splitting headaches and crippling confusion.

“Absolute Mind Command,” Jieyuan said, testing the word. That was the name of the first form of Absolute Will Command. The realmskill’s Redsoul form. What its other five forms were, he didn’t know. He’d only learn their names and what they did once he advanced to higher realms. But for the time being, Absolute Mind Command would give him plenty to work with.

And he felt like starting immediately.

Jieyuan promptly got to his feet, already considering his options.

He’d need someone to practice with. Absolute Mind Command was all about exerting your will on someone else, and as much as he understood how it worked in theory, he needed to put it to use to get a proper feel for it. Problem was, he didn’t have anyone he could just call on. Over the last two months, he hadn’t spent much time building connections. For one, he’d been too busy trying to keep up with Daojue and Meiyao. For another, everything indicated he’d soon be scouted by the Howling Lightning Sect in the Radiant Gold Summit. There was little point in getting to know the cultivators of the Gleaming Stone Sect when he’d only be in it for less than half a year.

Out of everyone in the sect, the two people he’d interacted with the most were Meiyao and Daojue, and he’d only dealt with them as far as the dozen or so missions they’d taken together had required. Disciples of the Gleaming Stone Sect were required to complete one mission every week, and new disciples were assigned fixed teams for those obligatory missions. Jieyuan’s team was himself, Meiyao, and Daojue, with the occasional randomly assigned inner disciple for missions outside the sect.

He’d check with Meiyao first. Chances were Daojue wouldn’t dignify his request with a response, just stare at him until he got the message and left. Meiyao wasn’t exactly the most approachable person in the world, either, but compared to Daojue anyone was a paragon of amiability, and she seemed to be at least somewhat reasonable.

No time like the present. Jieyuan left his bedroom, stepping out into the little, narrow corridor connecting the living room to his bedroom and the backyard. To his left was a slender sliding door that led to the backyard, while his right led down to his living room. He took the right.

His living room wasn’t much bigger than his bedroom, and empty save for a wooden table surrounded by four chairs in the center of it. On the left and right walls were three evenly spaced square windows half-covered by wooden blinds, just like the one in his bedroom. He walked past it, making straight for the door.

New disciples were assigned dwellings based on their rank in the entrance trials. As the third place, he’d been given one of the better houses available for outer disciples, and so had Meiyao and Daojue. They all lived nearby. Meiyao’s place, in particular, was just six houses down from his. He’d drop by and see if she was willing to help him out. In return, he could offer to serve as her sparring partner, or maybe as someone to test a technique on.

Only a couple of steps away from the door, he felt a pressure in the back of his head, accompanied by the knowledge that someone was at his doorstep. It was the inscribed field around his house, alerting him to the presence of someone near his house.

Knocking sounds came from the door.

Jieyuan stopped mid-step for a beat, then resumed his walk to the door. He reached out with his soulsense, and sensed the aura and soul of second-sign redsoul behind the door. He concentrated on the soul with his soulsense, searching for its spirit-song.

A graceful, vibrant melody resonating through ancient woods. Proud, if not lofty, majestic.

It was a spirit-song he recognized, one he’d already memorized, and sure enough, opening the door he found Meiyao on the other side.

She looked as absurdly beautiful as she always did, standing on his doorstep with her arms crossed, almost glowing under the shine of the midday sun. Behind her was a pristine stone path, leading down the main pathway, to which other houses identical to his own were connected. Ruby-leafed trees and shrubs surrounded the pathways.

Meiyao blinked at him. “That was quick.”

“I was on my way out.” To see you, in fact.

She waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever it was you were planning on doing, you can save it for later,” she said. “We’re on the same team for the Gleamstone Hunt.”

The Gleamstone Hunt. Jieyuan knew what it was, of course—it almost always came up in conversations when the Radiant Gold Summit was mentioned. The sect held the Hunt every five years, a month and a half before the Radiant Gold Summit. All disciples the right age to attend the Summit with at least second-order heavenly affinity were required to participate. They’d be divided into teams and sent to the Gleastome Valley to kill the chromal beasts that lived there. It served as both population control so that the chromal beasts wouldn’t spill out of the valley, and as a way to foster competition and hand out rewards in preparation for the Summit. Signing two deals with one stroke.

“I thought the teams would only be announced four days from now,” Jieyuan said absently, his mind on the Hunt—and how it’d be much easier to propose training together if they were going to be teamed up for a month-spanning event like the Gleamstone Hunt. And how it’d also let him keep an eye on Daojue.

“Officially, yes. But ours was decided today.”

Jieyuan didn’t need to ask how she’d found out. She was the sect leader’s daughter, and even if the rumors were true and she didn’t see eye-to-eye with her old man, she must still have some connections among the upper echelons of the sect.

“You, me, and Daojue?” The teams for the Hunt weren’t necessarily the same ones as the temporary mission teams new disciples were assigned, but Jieyuan had a feeling that this would be the case, given the unique circumstances of the three of them.

“Precisely,” Meiyao said. “I already have some plans for the Hunt, and the earlier we go through them together, the better.”

Jieyuan stepped forward, closing the door behind him. “Off to Daojue’s, then?”

“That’s right.” Already she was turning around.

“You do realize there’s a chance that he’ll just turn us away at the door, right?” Jieyuan said as he followed her into the main pathway.

Meiyao huffed. “We’ll see about that,” she said, challenge clear in her voice. She was supposed to be a Woodsoul, but she sure came across as a Firesoul at times.