Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

9

GLEAMING STONE

JIEYUAN

—∞—

It was in almost complete silence that what looked like a line of gray clouds appeared on the horizon, coming from the direction of the Inner Court. Beyond the Topaz Arch, a light gray cut across the blue-white skies.

As the gray clouds drew closer, Jieyuan noticed the men and women standing on top of them. Most of them wore ruby or topaz robes, but there were a handful of splashes of sapphire in their numbers. All the riders wore white lightcoats, marking them as elders of the sect. The best the sect had to offer. All of them tenth-sign redsouls, regardless of echelon. Any which one could’ve slaughtered all the disciples gathered here in Ruby Square in a matter of moments, and with relative ease.

The elders dropped height as they overflew the Topaz Arch, coming to a stop between the arch and Ruby Square, still way up in the air but not even half the height of the massive gateway now behind them, bunched midair in a large, loose group. Like stuck with like. The handful or so of sapphire-robed core elders—senior protectors by title—front and center, the topaz-robed inner elders forming a line a little further back in much greater numbers, and the ruby-robed outer elders, easily the majority, gathered in the back as a wall of red and white.

The group parted, and from their middle flew out a man in emerald robes. Like the others he had a lightcoat on, but he had something the others didn’t, a broad white sash around his waist. Jieyuan caught some sharp intakes of breath around him. The sash would’ve normally meant the man was a chief elder—the head elder of an echelon—but the emerald robes put a different spin on things.

In the Gleaming Stone Sect, you could generally tell what toes you could and couldn’t step on just by the look of them. The sect leaned on hierarchy as heavily as any other cabal, and it mainly relied on clothing as a mark of echelon. Jieyuan suspected the Liangshibai obsession with gemstones—and their colors—was to blame. Now, emerald robes? Only one person in the entire sect wore that color, and that was one set of toes you definitely wanted to tread carefully around.

Jieyuan squinted his eyes up at the emerald-robed man, straining to see past the glare of the sun coming from directly overhead. Sect Leader Junjie. Jieyuan had only seen him once before, during his induction into the sect right after the entrance trials. Back then he hadn’t known of the man’s connection to his teammate, and now that he did, he couldn’t help but try and draw comparisons between them, looking for similarities, hints of shared blood.

Little luck there. Liangshibai Junjie looked to be fairly tall—Jieyuan couldn’t tell for certain given the distance and perspective—and that was pretty much where the similarities with his daughter ended. The man was handsome enough, but his looks were sharper, colder, sterner. And then there were his black eyes and hair, both entirely mundane and nothing like his daughter’s unusual palette. Meiyao must’ve taken entirely after her mother. If anything, the sect leader resembled Daojue more than he did Meiyao. Though with how little Meiyao looked like her father, that wasn’t saying much.

He stole a sideways glance at Meiyao. Brows furrowed, jaw clenched, she was outright glowering at her father, her expression as dark and stormy as he’d ever seen it, just short of murderous.

Now, Jieyuan didn’t consider himself a particularly curious person, and he was perfectly happy to let others hold onto their secrets. He only bothered so much with the sect’s grapevine because his father had drilled into his head from a very young age that knowledge was power—and that ignorance could kill as certainly as any blade. So he was always on the lookout for information he could somehow use to his advantage, rather than to satisfy any middling sense of curiosity.

Looking at Meiyao now, though, he felt a rare stab of curiosity. Just how bad was Meiyao’s fallout with her family, to get that kind of reaction out of her? He hadn’t gotten much out of the rumors circulating the Outer Court, and despite the hints Yunzhu had dropped earlier, what he knew of the matter wasn’t enough to even sketch the whole picture, let alone paint it. But going by on Yunzhu’s words earlier, he at least knew something important now.

Yunzhu’s grandfather was involved, and Jieyuan doubted it was Yunzhu’s paternal grandfather. Both Sect Leader Junjie and Elder Taishou, Yunzhu’s father, were mundaneborns, so he’d be surprised if either Meiyao or Wanxin had anything to do with their fathers’ families. No, the one Yunzhu had been referring to was her maternal grandfather. As in the father of Yunzhu’s mother, Wanxin. Which was a mite concerning, since Yunzhu’s grandfather was the sect’s chief protector, making him the most powerful man in the sect. The one that was really in control of the sect, the one the sect leader answered to. That was already two members of the sect’s highest echelons who were embroiled in Meiyao’s family drama.

Jieyuan would have liked to say that he only wanted to know more because this might concern him further down the line if he wanted to stick around Meiyao, given she might very well be part of the Weave Mystery. And he could have said it, but he didn’t care for lying to himself. By this point, it was already awfully clear to him that his interest in Meiyao and her matters wasn’t exactly strictly professional.

“Disciples,” Junjie said. The sect leader’s voice rang out sharp and clear throughout Ruby Square. He was probably using some chromal gear to achieve that effect. Junjie sounded much like he looked. Hard, stern. Again, a much closer match for Daojue than Meiyao, though she could certainly pull off frosty when the mood struck her. “You have been gathered here today to take part in the Gleamstone Hunt. From here you will be taken to the Gleamstone Valley, where you will be tasked with hunting as many gleam beasts as you can. Hunt hard, but wisely. This is a trial, and hubris and carelessness will see you dead. You shall be rewarded according to your performance, and the best among you will be chosen to participate in the Radiant Gold Summit.”

That, Jieyuan suspected, might have been meant to be a motivational speech of sorts, but just like the speech Junjie had given at Jieyuan’s induction, there wasn’t much to it beyond a series of statements. No emotion to it, no passion. No fire. Jieyuan doubted that charisma had been a deciding factor when the Core Court elected Junjie sect leader. The man wasn’t nearly as bad as Daojue—Daojue had all the geniality of a slab of cold, hard steel—but Junjie didn’t strike Jieyuan as much of a leader. More of a detached, impersonal overseer.

Junjie stood there atop his cloudcraft, hovering high above as he stared down at them in the silence that followed his speech, hands behind his back. Jieyuan narrowed his eyes, reconsidering his opinion of the man. Charisma aside, the sect leader did have a presence about him. An intensity.

Without any further words, Junjie flew his cloudcraft higher, until he was about level with the top of Topaz Arch, and the crowd of elders gathered behind him sprung into simultaneous, coordinated action. They spread out as they descended to ground level, forming a circle around Ruby Square. Once they’d landed, they extended their arms in front of them, and from their sleeves, the same billowing chromal silk that made up their cloudcraft poured out, pooling down on the ground in front of them. Meanwhile, the sapphire-robed senior protectors, rather than descending with the rest, moved their clouds upward to join the sect leader higher in the air.

More and more cloudcraft material kept flowing out the sleeves of the outer and inner elders, pooling down onto the ground. These pools of chromal silk then began flowing, liquid-like, toward Ruby Square. The strange, shimmering material rapidly ate up ground, unhindered as it spread throughout the square under the feet of the disciples gathered there, advancing into the square from all directions, from about a hundred different sources.

Jieyuan watched on, eyes a little wide. The steadily creeping layer-wave of threads didn’t take long to reach him, and he felt nothing as they carpeted the stone under his feet in light gray. He’d had no idea cloudcrafts were capable of… Well, whatever this was. Diffusion? Propagation? Expansion? He’d only had two personal experience with cloudcrafts before, and one had been his very brief ride back to the sect from the Fatebloom Woods.

He directed his soulsense to the sheet of chromal threads below him, trying to get a feel for its properties, but he’d never taken the time to focus on a cloudcraft before, and all he got was a very faint, confusing jumble of impressions he’d need far more time than the little he had at hand to puzzle out. At first blush, though, its spirit-song sounded significantly more complex than that of his mind-link ring, which up until now had been the most complex artifact he’d used his soulsense on. It was little wonder that for the most part only the elders and protectors—junior and senior—of the Gleaming Stone Sect had cloudcrafts. Cloudcrafts weren’t just tenth-sign Redsoul artifacts, but highly complex ones at that. They had to cost a fortune and a half.

The dozens of separate pools of cloudcraft matter met and merged, turning into one singular massive carpet of chromal silk spanning the entirety of Ruby Square. But even though there wasn’t any more red in sight, all of the square blotted out by the paper-thin coat of gray, chromal silk kept pouring out the sleeves of the elders. It took Jieyuan a moment to realize, using the grass beyond Ruby Square as reference, that he was rising off the ground, the chromal silk under his feet expanding upward.

The burgeoning cloud they were on kept on thickening, ballooning like a lung filling itself with air, until Jieyuan was a foot or so off the ground. At that point, the elders around the square pulled their arms back and stopped adding to the gigantic cloudcraft they’d formed. The clouds the elders were on, Jieyuan noticed, had also merged with the massive one over the square.

Jieyuan caught movement from above, and saw that Sect Leader Junjie had raised his hand. Wordlessly, the man spun his cloudcraft around and had it slowly float higher. Jieyuan felt something shift subtly under his feet, his balance slightly tilting, and then realized that the composite cloud had taken off, floating steadily upwards. Jieyuan was quick to aura-lash himself to the swathe of chromal silk under him, anchoring his aura—and his body, by extension—to it. With his soulsense he felt Daojue and Meiyao beside him doing the same.

The gigantic cloudcraft moved slowly, even in plain-space, but as it gained altitude it also gained speed. They rose straight upward, until they were past Topaz Arch and much closer to the sky than Jieyuan had ever been, at least in this life. He looked up, skyward, noting how close the expanse of blue and white above seemed—but also how it was still a long way off.

He turned his head to the left. His team had been near one of the edges of Ruby Square, putting them now near one of the borders of the cloudcraft, so from his position he could see off the side into the ground several hundred feet away.

A small patch of red it took him a moment to recognize as Ruby Arch hung far below. Around it were the valleys, hills, and mounts of the Gleaming Stone Sect, looking like lines and waves of shades of green and brown, peppered with the shades of white and gray of buildings. It struck him both how small everything—every individual building and feature of the land—seemed, but also how massive the sum of it, the Gleaming Stone Sect, was. The Gleaming Stone Mountains, the spine-like sprawling mountain range the Gleaming Stone Sect called its domain, seemed to stretch on almost infinitely, and he could only just barely catch a glowing glimpse—far, far off into the distance—of gold he knew to be Radiant Gold City.

A Redsoul sect was already like this. Spanning a vast territory, and with enough wealth to outfit their elders with as many cloudcrafts as to create this massive composite cloud. To cover the land and conquer the skies. A Redsoul sect, a sect of the lowest rank. With five more ranks above it, each exponentially grander than the last. Even with Amyas’s memories and perspective, Jieyuan found it hard to imagine what a sect of the next rank, Orangesoul, would be like, let alone a Violetsoul one.

The cloudcraft began to drift forward. Wind built up, brushing against Jieyuan’s face, but there wasn’t much of it, and aura-lashing kept him locked in place. He breathed in deeply, tasting the cool, rarefied air. He hadn’t gotten to properly appreciate his last cloudcraft ride. When the elder gave them a ride back to the sect from the Fatebloom Woods after their mission gone wrong, she flew as fast as a cloudcraft could manage, or close to that. Even soul-stilling, wind had whipped at him, his outer robe ballooning and billowing, and the ground had been barely more than a blur. Right now? Right now they were moving only slighter faster than he could run at full soul-stilling.

Turning his head forward, he found he couldn’t see much of what lay ahead, the thick throng of disciples spread out in front of him doing an awful good job of blocking the view. He looked back to the side. Below he saw some other groups of buildings. They were past the Topaz Arch now, so that had to be the Inner Court. It didn’t look that much different from the Outer Court, but gazing down from this high above stripped the things of the ground down to little more than shapes and colors.

The buildings disappeared, and then they were overflying valleys, leaving the seat of the sect—the sect proper, the sum of all of its buildings—behind them as they delved deeper into the Gleaming Stone Mountains.

He caught some murmur coming from farther ahead and even some gasps, but he couldn’t see what it was about. Then the cloudcraft slowed to a stop, and Sect Leader Junjie’s voice sounded, “Inner, prime, and core disciples, gather at the front. Outer disciples, to the back.”

A pause, then movement, feet shuffling. Not much of it, though. Back in Ruby Square, Jieyuan had noticed how the higher-echelon disciples were mostly gathered on the side closer to Topaz Arch, so it didn’t take long for everyone to get in the right position. Jieyuan and his team stayed put throughout. Around them, the red-robed disciples gathered closer, while ahead, past some invisible line, was a much smaller group of disciples in orange, yellow, and blue.

That same invisible line then turned into a gap as the gigantic cloudcraft split in half. The half with the outer disciples stayed put, while the one containing the higher-echelon disciples sped forward. And with the other half out of the way, Jieyuan saw what lay on the ground ahead.

And he understood what the commotion earlier had been about.

Below was a valley. Two towering, sloping mountains enclosing a large, roughly oval area. But where a normal valley was made up of earth and stone and plant life, this one had one thing, and one thing only.

Gleamstone.

The inward face of the mountains around the valley—the Gleaming Twins, Jieyuan recalled they were called—were pure walls of the whitish, translucent, crystalline material, catching the glare of the sun and refracting it into an almost blinding rainbow radiance. And the area between the Twins was much of the same, a massive sheet of gleamstone, looking like a crystal ocean, even more radiant than the walls surrounding them as they caught sunlight directly from above and translated it into kaleidoscopic brilliance. The Gleamstone Forest.

It was breathtaking in the best and worst ways. The valley was beautiful, exquisite and exotic to an extent that defied description. But also deeply unnatural. Alien, disturbing, in a way that unsettled him to the bone. It was a primal, instinctive sort of revulsion, almost dread, like what he was seeing was just plain wrong. A sight as chilling as it was dazzling.

Even before Jieyuan had joined the sect, he’d known what the Gleamstone Valley would look like. There wasn’t anyone that lived in the Radiant Gold District, mundane or chromal, that didn’t. He’d also even seen gleam beasts—those eerie, crystalline creatures—in person before, so he’d had a decent enough idea of what to expect, something to use as reference. But he still went wide-eyed and dead-still as he took in the Gleamstone Valley, mesmerized—and profoundly unsettled.

A humming sound came from beside him. He turned and saw that it was Meiyao, also looking off into the valley. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

She didn’t look like she was itching for a fight anymore. Rather, she had a strange look on her face he couldn’t quite make out, something between melancholy and remembrance, and Jieyuan’s breath caught again, but for all the wrong reasons. Beautiful though the Gleamstone Valley was, Meiyao somehow managed to be more, brown cascade of curls fluttering behind her in the soft wind, brilliant green eyes focused on the distance, melancholy playing across her porcelain features.

Heavens rob and cheat him. Rob him ragged and cheat him coinless.

“It is.” His mouth was dry. He licked his lips, searched for something witty to say—something at all, really—but words escaped him. So he looked off to the side, to his other teammate.

Daojue also had his eyes on the valley, and to someone who didn’t know him he’d have looked impassive. But Jieyuan could immediately tell something was off. Daojue’s jaw was just the slightest bit clenched, eyes just a tad narrowed. The same wary look Daojue wore around Yunzhu.

Meiyao had focused on the beauty of the Gleamstone Valley. She’d grown up in the sect, among the Liangshibai, so she must’ve seen it before, maybe even been inside it. But Jieyuan and Daojue didn’t have familiarity to blunt the impact of the sight like Meiyao probably did, and from the looks of it Daojue, much like Jieyuan himself, was more concerned with the oddity of the Gleamstone Valley than its beauty. Or rather, given it was Daojue, Jieyuan doubted beauty had even crossed the man’s mind.

The cloudcraft carrying the upper-echelon disciples dipped lower and lower as it flew deeper into the valley, and so did theirs, except they descended directly downward. Aura-lashing kept him firmly in place as their cloudcraft dropped altitude. Jieyuan kept his eyes fixed forward, watching as the valley grew closer and as what used to be blotches of color and flashes of radiance gained form and detail.

They alighted right at the southern entrance of the valley, an open stretch of gleamstone-coated ground near where Twins met. Ahead was the Gleamstone Forest, a line of crystal trees marking where the forest began, stretching from wall to wall of the valley, Twin to Twin, easily a mile across even though this was where the valley was at its narrowest.

Proximity only magnified both the forest’s beauty and eeriness. The sea of gleamstone trees was like a gallery of the most excruciatingly chiseled crystal sculptures, varying greatly in size and shape. Unlike in the Fatebloom Woods, where the only chromal plants had been the fatebloom trees, in a single glance here he could count at least three different types of chromal trees. A group of trees barely ten feet tall, cone-shaped, a set of much taller ones, with crowns like clouds, and others taller still, with thicker trunks and wide, downward-sloping canopies.

What they had in common was their nature. Jagged gleamstone for bark, half-translucent with deeper, starker veins of denser crystal visible inside, with shard-like branches and blade-like leaves. Most of them were a pale, hazy, off-white color, but they varied in that too, some trees having a touch of ruby in them, others leaning toward sapphire or amethyst or some other gemstone color. Between and around the trees, peeking out from the ground, were smaller crystalline plants, shrubs and seedlings, varying in color and shape and size just like the trees they crowded.

And they glowed, one and all. Each branch, each leaf, each inch of crystal plant life, stealing the light of the sun into itself and radiating a motley of spectral colors. So did the floor they grew from, a shimmering sheet of rough, uneven gleamstone spanning the entire valley.

Jieyuan stared, finding it hard to wrap his head around the idea that all of this before his eyes—plants and ground and all—was alive. That all of this alien crystalline life could grow and spread. That these living crystals did grow and spread. He wondered at the source of it all, at what exactly had birthed the Gleamstone Valley. Whether long ago some cultivator had done something that led to its appearance, like the Yikongwei Founder was supposedly behind the birth of the Fatebloom Woods. The Liangshibai, he was sure, definitely would have something to do with it, what with their gemstone eyes.

Jieyuan then noticed the ground getting closer, and looking to the sides he saw that the elders that had come along with their group had their arms out, chromal silk flowing out from the composite cloudcraft they were on and back into their sleeves. Most of these elders, Jieyuan noticed, were outer elders.

Then, catching a shadow on the ground, he glanced up and saw that hovering in the air in front of the disciples was a senior protector, sapphire-robed. The only core elder around. A woman with orange eyes and the sleek frame and chiseled lines of the Liangshibai. Striking like the Liangshibai usually were.

The cloudcraft carrying the disciples disappeared, fully collected up by the elders, and the soles of Jieyuan’s fullgreaves met the ground. The gleamstone under his feet registered to his soulsense as a sheet of first-shade red.

Now riding separate cloudcrafts again, the elders around them flew back into the air and took position behind the protector—who was… staring at him? Jieyuan frowned, following her eyes more carefully, and saw that no, the Liangshibai woman instead had her attention somewhere slightly to his left, to… Meiyao. Who was looking away, and as far as Jieyuan could tell, pointedly avoiding the protector’s eyes.

“I am Liangshibai Yuyan,” she said, regarding all the disciples as a whole now. The name rang familiar, and Jieyuan placed it the next instant. Yuyan—that was the name of Sect Leader Junjie’s first wife. It was through his marriage to her that Junjie was adopted into the Liangshibai Clan. That made her Meiyao’s stepmother. “And I’ll be acting as the overseer of the Outer Hunt.”

Jieyuan considered the woman more carefully. Yuyan wasn’t just Sect Leader Junjie’s wife. She was also Yunzhu’s aunt, sister to her mother Wanxin, and daughter of the sect’s chief protector. Jieyuan found that she did more closely resemble his white-robed proctor for the entrance trials than the other Liangshibai women he’d seen so far. Something about the set of her face, the way it all came together.

“The Outer Hunt will last a total of thirty days.” Yuyan’s voice carried effortlessly. She had to be using some artifact to enhance her voice like the sect leader had. Unlike the sect leader, though, she didn’t sound as warm as a cooling corpse. If anything, there was actual warmth to her voice. It reminded him of Wanxin, and how effortlessly friendly she’d been to him. “On the thirtieth, you’re all to make your way back here. The elders behind me will be overflying the forest during that time, and should you find yourself in any danger, use a dust beacon and one will come to you.”

Yuyan narrowed her eyes, sending a brief but pointed glance at Meiyao, who was still focusing on everything but the woman in the sky. “As the sect leader said, however, you must hunt wisely. There’s no guarantee that we elders will see the beacon and react in time to save you, and if an elder does come to your rescue, you’ll be removed from the Hunt. So only use a dust beacon if you must, and avoid putting yourself in a situation in which you must use it in the first place. Any questions?”

There was silence. About a week before, the sect had sent over servants to all disciples participating in the Hunt with a jade book containing their assigned team as well as the details of the Hunt, just about everything you needed to know.

Yuyan gave a nod and a slight smile. “Good hunting.”

After one last lingering look sent Meiyao’s way that went unmet like all the other ones, Yuyan took to the skies together with the other elders, their cloudcrafts shooting through the air like blurs, sweeping away with the blistering speed Jieyuan had grown to associate with cloudcrafts.

Out of all the outer disciples, Daojue was the first to move. As everyone else stood still, unsure, eyes either on the forest ahead or on the sky above where the elders had disappeared to, Daojue didn’t waste even a second as he made straight for the Gleamstone Forest in large, measured strides. The crowd parted around him like it’d made way for Qingshi and Yunzhu earlier, and Jieyuan had little doubt that if anyone had remained in Daojue’s way he’d have barreled straight into them. Meiyao was hot on his heels, and Jieyuan was quick to snap up after his team.

By the time they got to the tree line, Jieyuan had caught up to Daojue, and Meiyao had taken the lead, walking slightly ahead of them. Behind, Jieyuan could hear the other disciples moving about, fullgreaves sharply thumping against the gleamstone floor, and the hums and murmurs of low conversations.

Stepping into the forest proper, Jieyuan immediately felt the presence of the crystal plants around him, crowding his soulsense. Meiyao set a brisk pace as she strode straight forward, weaving through the trees.

About a hundred steps in, Jieyuan could no longer hear the presence of other disciples. There were only the faint, ringing sounds of their footsteps, of metal meeting crystal, and of the breeze whispering through the branches and leaves above, producing a gentle, formless chime. None of the sounds Jieyuan associated with forests. No crackling of twigs or rustling of underbrush or murmurs and chatters of wildlife. All there was to break the monotony of their ringing steps and the chiming wind was the bright shattering that sounded whenever one of them stepped on a fallen crystal branch or crystal leaf or some other loose piece of crystal plant.

There was life all around him, but it was crystalline life, life that felt dead, sterile, even as it thrived.

Jieyuan kept his hands by his waist, palms resting on the halves of his spear. It wasn’t just the eeriness of the forest that had him on edge, though that’d have been plenty on its own. The Fatebloom Woods was home to only one race of chromal beasts, fatebloom elk, and the beasts there were few and seldom strayed far from the depths of the woods. The Gleamstone Forest was different. Dozens of different races of gleam beasts lived in the Outer Forest alone, and in considerable numbers. Numbers that were at their highest during the Gleamstone Hunt.

In theory, there was no cause for worry, at least for the moment. Jieyuan knew as much. In preparation for the Hunt, he’d read up a bit more on the Gleamstone Forest, and he’d found that it wasn’t just divided into the Outer and Inner Forests, but also into ten ring-shaped areas. The gleamstone making up the forest floor wasn’t all at first-sign Redsoul. The closer you got to the center of the forest, the higher the soulsign of the crystal on the ground, with the different-soulsign stretches of gleamstone forming rings around the center of the forest. Ten of them, named both after their position and soulsign. The First Ring was the outermost, where the ground was first-sign Redsoul gleamstone, and the Tenth Ring the innermost, with tenth-sign Redsoul gleamstone for floor.

Jieyuan flexed and relaxed his fingers around the shafts of his spear halves. Flexing. Relaxing. Flexing. Relaxing. Right now they were still in the First Ring, the crystal underfoot still first-shade red to his soulsense. That meant the only chromal beasts around should be first-sign ones, as gleam beasts and plants of different soulsigns were similarly split across the Rings. That was why the Hunt was divided the way it was. The Outer Forest comprised the First and Second Rings, and the Inner Forest the Rings Third through Tenth. So you found first-sign and second-sign Redsoul beasts and plants in the Outer Forest, and higher-sign chromal life in the Inner Forest, all according to the Ring you were in.

And first-sign gleam beasts were indeed no cause for worry. Given the chasm-like chromal weight differential between first-sign and second-sign, the beasts of the First Ring wouldn’t be able to so much as scratch them. If anything, from what he’d read, gleam beasts could even sense their soulsign from afar and would go out of their way to avoid the three of them because of their higher soulsign.

Problem was, it wasn’t impossible or even unheard of for gleam beasts to wander out of their home Ring, and when they did, it was always outward, to a weaker Ring. Harmless as first-sign gleam beasts might be to them, the same couldn’t be said about second-sign ones. Even more so if they were ambushed, caught off guard. And something like that was most likely to happen during the Gleamstone Hunt, with the number of gleam beasts so high.

So Jieyuan didn’t let his guard down. Even if he felt rather silly as he watched Meiyao, who was just gliding ahead, almost prancing, looking by all rights like she was in her natural habitat, in her element. But he’d rather feel silly than dead, so he kept an eye out. Daojue, at least, hadn’t lost any of the tension Jieyuan had noticed in him earlier.

“One moment,” Meiyao suddenly called, before making her way over to a gleamstone tree on her left—one of the tall ones, with a sprawling canopy of crystal leaves far above—and crouching down near its base. Jieyuan stopped, watching as she plucked a small flower from beside the trunk.

The trunk… Jieyuan narrowed his eyes. Something was off about it. Its glow was a bit more intense at parts, and there was some sort of outline— He blinked, eyes running across the massive, circular, almost invisible body of the largest snake he’d ever seen in his life, coiled around the tree in loops.

“Meiyao!” he snapped, soul-stilling, reality around him slowing, and before he knew it he was drawing his spear halves and snapping them together, advancing—

Meiyao stood up, startled, and whirled around.

Her laugh stopped Jieyuan dead. Not even two steps behind, he noticed Daojue, who’d also armed his spear, similarly freezing.

“Oh. Right.” She turned back around, shaking her head, smiling, eyes alight. “This big guy’s harmless. It’s just a shifting gleam python. First-sign, worth almost nothing at all. Not even the effort of cutting it down.” She reached up and gave the beast a little tap. The spot where she touched shimmered, quickly flashing between the full spectrum of colors, but the creature didn’t move otherwise. “It’s terrified of us, if anything. Doing its best job to stay invisible. It’s rather cute, actually.”

“Oh.” Jieyuan swallowed, glanced at the python once more. He was still way too far away to soulsense it. Granted, given their location, it was most likely to have been a first-sign beast. But still… No. No point in pressing the issue. He halved his spear and sheathed it again. Daojue, he noticed, had already done so. “This… This isn’t your first time here in the forest, is it?”

He’d had that thought earlier, when he’d seen her gazing down at the Gleamstone Valley from above, but now he was certain of it. Meiyao was way too comfortable. He eyed the barely visible massive snake still hugging the tree. Even now that he knew that it couldn’t possibly harm him because of its soulsign, he couldn’t deny his wariness. It was his mundane-born origins rearing up. Growing up, a snake more than fifty times his size was the stuff of nightmares. That it was made of living crystal and could turn partially invisible didn’t make it any better.

Cute, she’d called it. Cute.

“First time? Hardly. Aunt Yuyan and Mo—” She cut herself off, frowning. “Let’s get going. We’re not even halfway to the Second Ring yet.” She took a couple of steps, then paused, and turned back to face them, holding up the flower she’d picked up. “And keep a lookout for more of these. Tell me if you see one.”

The flower was made entirely from purplish gleamstone. It had a long stalk with bulbous, grape-like crystal pods hanging off from it. “Why? What is it?”

“A violet gleamstone hyacinth.” Meiyao held it up a few moments longer, then drew open the glyph-stretch pouch by her waist and tossed the flower inside. “First-sign gleamstone plants aren’t generally used much in concoctions, but that one’s the exception.”

“Concoctions?” Jieyuan said. “You’re a refiner too?” No. Not when she was already a nurturer. Maybe she wanted to grow some of her own? Or exchange it, or—

“I am,” Meiyao said. And then she was back to walking.

Jieyuan stared. Stared as she walked away, as Daojue paid Meiyao’s revelation no mind and resumed pace.

Nurturing and refining. That was two chromal crafts Meiyao had taken up. Meiyao, who hadn’t been a cultivator for even half a year. Meiyao, who had a lead on him in both cultivation and martial arts, even though he’d dedicated himself exclusively to those. And he had a feeling that Meiyao wasn’t just dabbling in refining, either. He had a feeling that she was as advanced at it as she was at nurturing.

The thought of it brought up such a confusing, conflicting rush of feelings—envy, inadequacy, ambition, desire—that he took a moment to just let it wash over him. Then he let it all drain away, out of his system, and following Daojue’s example, paid the matter no more mind and carried on walking like he couldn’t care less.

He’d let Maeva work that out later.

They didn’t come across any other beasts on their way through the First Ring, though Meiyao did stop three more times to pick up plants. Then Meiyao stopped.

“Second Ring,” she said.

Jieyuan tensed. He walked a few more steps and stopped beside her. Just ahead, at the edge of his soulsense, the gleamstone ground registered as second-shade red. Looking more closely at the trees and plants around, he saw that the ones in front did look different from the ones behind. Taller, brighter, with slightly different hues and shapes.

Meiyao unsheathed her finesaber and Daojue readied his spear again. Jieyuan was only too happy to follow suit.

“We’ll try to make it straight across to the Third Ring,” Meiyao said, “but there’s a good chance we’ll find a second-sign beast before we make it there. Most Second Ring beasts will avoid us like the First Ring ones, but there are a few races of second-sign gleam beasts that won’t shy away from a target at the same soulsign. Stay on your guard.”

They were barely a third of the way through the Second Ring when they came across another gleam beast.

Meiyao’s prediction was only half right, though. Because it wasn’t a second-sign beast they came across.

It was a third-sign one.