Chương 23

Dusk settled into evening as they found a clearing beyond the village wall which would make a suitable campsite. But as Lodin and Dae Han began to prepare the area, there was a loud thump behind them. They turned to find Akiyama Shin standing next to a structure he had apparently retrieved from his storage ring. It was a small house in the imperial style, crafted with no expense spared. Dark lacquered timber formed the frame. Glazed tiles in deep blue covered the peaked roof.

Latticed windows of pale paper glowed faintly from within. A narrow porch ran along the front, its railings carved with serpentine patterns. Bronze fittings gleamed at every corner. Shin crossed the porch in two steps, slid the door open, and disappeared inside. The door slid shut behind him. Lodin looked at Dae Han. Dae Han looked at Lodin. They shrugged. Then they got to work making camp. Lodin gathered stones from the edge of the treeline and arranged them in a ring.

Dae Han collected deadfall, snapped branches over his knee, and stacked kindling at the center. Then he produced some flint and steel from his own storage ring and struck them together until the tinder caught the sparks. Once the flame came alive, he fed it twigs, then larger sticks, then thick branches, and as he did so the flames climbed and cast orange light against the darkening sky. Lodin sat back and watched the more proficient camper go about it.

"I've got some plum wine," he said.

"Should take the edge off the chill." Dae Han nodded as he fed sticks to the fire.

"Get it out." Lodin reached into his storage ring and produced a ceramic jug and two cups. He poured and handed one to Dae Han. Dae Han produced a small pouch from his own storage ring, retrieved what looked like a recovery pill from it. He popped the pill into his mouth and took a sip of the wine to wash it down, and his eyebrows rose.

"Damn," he said.

"That's good." Lodin nodded and sipped from his own cup.

"My mom's brew." Dae Han looked at him. Something shifted in his expression, a flicker behind that one good eye, as if he knew something Lodin did not.

"Your mom taught you some cooking, eh." Lodin nodded.

"She gave birth to two remarkable sons." Lodin laughed.

"We wouldn't be remarkable without our master's training. Without him we'd just be cripples. You remind me of him, a little. He was a wanderer for a long time."

"That would explain something you said to me earlier," Dae Han said, as he had another sip.

"Huh?"

"About taking knowledge from different times and places, fitting the pieces together into something no one's done before." He swirled the wine in his cup.

"A wandering master would have that kind of breadth." Lodin blinked. He realized he had indeed said as much, when they were walking out of Hong Nguyen's gambling den. Dae Han gave him a speculative look.

"Don't suppose you'd care to continue explaining." Lodin sat back against the trunk of a tree, rested his head against it.

"If I tell you now, you could just fuck off and stop helping me make campfires." Dae Han smiled wryly.

"And miss the end of this little caper? Nah." Lodin gave Dae Han a speculative look. If he did leave, it would impair Lodin's ability to find things in the city. Dae Han had connections, he knew the landscape. He'd demonstrated as much already. But there was something about the man which gave Lodin the feeling his interests weren't purely mercenary. Again Lodin felt the discomfort that came with a wager of trust, and again he chose to go ahead and trust him.

"It works like this," he said. And as he said it, he looked around and found a twig he could use as a pen for the dirt between them. He found one, and used it to draw nine small circles clustered together tightly.

"My Roots," he said. Then he drew nine dashes around the nine Roots, at a greater distance. Like a second concentric circle.

"My Gates," he said. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. And then he drew little triangles above each of the nine dashes.

"My Seals," he said. Dae Han sipped his plum wine and watched intently. Lodin tapped one of the Gates with the tip of his twig.

"I was born with all of these closed. Which, under normal circumstances, is the beginning and end of someone's aspirations to be a cultivator." Dae Han nodded.

"But as it turns out, being born with all of one's Gates sealed shut has a peculiar side effect," he said, and then he tapped the triangle above the dash.

"The Seals technically have no cap on their power. The problem of qi remains though. A system without qi is a machine with no fuel. It doesn't matter how impressive it might be, it's not going to go anywhere if you can't feed it."

"You'd be noticeably stronger than a normal mortal, but that would be about it," said Dae Han. Lodin smirked and nodded.

"That's exactly how it was. But then I met my teacher, who did a few things." He drew lines from his Roots, past the dashes of his Gates, and straight to the triangles of his Seals.

"He changed my Roots, and then he gave me three Techniques that made it all work." Something about the way Dae Han nodded along made Lodin think he knew at least a little about these techniques already. But he continued nonetheless. Lodin grinned.

"I'll do my best impression of him." Then he slouched and let his eyelids droop, let his smile become languid. The twig in his hands became a phony pipe he took a drag from, making Dae Han chuckle. Lodin made his voice into Yan's slow, raspy drawl.

"For you, young Lodin, the solution will require three Techniques." He held up one finger.

"Sustenance. A technique of the Saxifrage Monks, who tend to the long and arduous task of reviving dead worlds. The Saxifrage Monks must sustain their bodies in environments with no food, no water, and no natural qi. To do this, they connect their Roots to Taiyi. The Great Unity, the state where Yin and Yang haven't yet separated, which exists across all worlds and is a boundless well of Yuan Qi - Origin Qi.

Sustenance then provides the body with a baseline quantity of Origin Qi, which becomes Vital Energy as it enters the body." He held up a second finger.

"Ninefold Root Transmutation: Jirou Pattern. One of the Ninefold Root Transmutations devised by the alchemist Chan Heung, and recorded in the Fifth Sanctioned Imperial Alchemical Journal. The Jirou Pattern strips the elemental affinity from a cultivator's Roots, and reroutes the meridians to build a direct bridge from Root to Seal. The Gates are bypassed entirely.

Potential elemental expression is sacrificed, but in exchange, every drop of qi the Roots produces flows straight to the Seals with nothing lost in between." He held up a third finger.

"Heart's Blood Sacrifice. A technique of the Beast Court, crafted to be used in last ditch attacks. Fear the cornered animal, for it will lash out with all the power and aggression it can summon, even if it should injure itself in doing so. Heart's Blood Sacrifice pulls from Vital Energy when all else is depleted, to fuel an explosive last ditch attack. The cost is damage to the Roots. But here is the secret: Roots damaged in this way always heal back a little stronger than they were before."

Lodin dropped the Yan impression, sat up straight again.

"The Saxifrage Monks crafted their techniques to survive in places void of qi. The Beast Court, meanwhile, favor explosive, aggressive expenditures of qi. When the two are combined with the Jirou Pattern..."

"It creates a circuit," said Dae Han.

"Sustenance gives you Vital Energy in a never-ending trickle. The Jirou Pattern sends it straight to your Seals. And Heart's Blood Sacrifice..." He trailed off. His eye widened.

"You're using it to expand your Roots. Over and over. The damage heals back stronger each time, so the more you use it, the more your Roots can channel. With the three functioning together, you become a Vital Energy monster." Lodin nodded.

"We weren't in any rush before. Master Yan had a long road planned for me. Years of gradual expansion, nice and steady." The smile faded.

"Then Lorn was taken. And suddenly we were in a rush." He poked at the fire with a stick.

"Master Yan threw me into a Single Mote Eternity Chamber for ten days." Dae Han let out a low whistle.

"Ten days passed in the outside world and a thousand days passed inside it. He kicked the shit out of me every day, which triggered Heart's Blood Sacrifice over and over. Thousands of times. Tens of thousands of times. Until my Roots, and by extension my Seals, were about strong enough to handle whatever I might find here." Dae Han's face pinched like he'd bitten into something sour.

"Sounds tedious." Lodin shrugged.

"It was rough." Dae Han chuckled at the understatement.

"Well it's a clever build, all the same," said Dae Han.

"Very clever. Not without its weaknesses though. Losing the elemental expressions of your Roots is nasty." Lodin shrugged.

"Nobody's perfect." Dae Han chuckled again and finished his cup of wine. He set it down by the jug and leaned back, let his gaze settle on the fire. It was quiet for a while.

"Strange thing, having your build planned for you," he finally said.

"Though I'm sure it happens plenty within the sects."

"There's room to make it my own." Dae Han nodded slowly. He was quiet again for a few moments. Then he closed his eyes, smiled, and let out a quiet exhale through his nose.

"Appreciate you telling me," he said, without opening his eyes.

"You were right about what you said before. It's not that it's especially useful. I'm just the sort who likes to know for the sake of knowing."

"Gotcha." Dae Han pulled his kasa down over his face and settled against the ground.

"Get some rest, we've a sect compound to infiltrate tomorrow." Lodin nodded. But instead of lying down, he poured himself another cup of plum wine and stared into the fire as he sipped on it. The flames crackled. Sparks rose and vanished against the stars. Lodin watched them go and let his mind wander. Lorn's face surfaced in his memory. The way he used to look, pale and thin, sitting in his chair with his head propped against a cushion because his neck couldn't hold it up.

The crooked smile he wore when he teased Lodin about one thing or another. The fierce joy in his eyes the first time he stood on his own two feet, yantra tattoos fresh on his skin, tears on his cheeks. And then the ring of flames around the portal. Lorn on the far side, his eyes ablaze, his aura wrong, his body moved by something that was not him. The smile on his face belonged to someone, something else. The way he stepped through and vanished and Lodin stood there with fists raised and no one to strike.

Months on a ship, day after day of salt air and empty horizons while his brother remained in the hands of people who sacrificed whole villages, stacked their bodies in mass graves, and used them as fodder for dark rituals. While they prepared Lorn to become a vessel. To be honored above all others. Lodin frowned, drank wine, and stared into the flames, and tried not to imagine the worst. He lost track of the passage of time, but the night darkened around him and the flames dwindled down to almost nothing.

Then the scrape of a footstep in the dirt snapped him back to reality. A woman walked out of the shadows. She wore a black cloak made of crow feathers, and had short black hair and light brown skin. Her eyes were a shade of green so bright and deep and clear it was unnerving.

"Any of that wine left?" she asked.