Chương 111: Chapter 100: When the Road Broke

The Greyspine road remained quiet through most of the morning. After the warnings at Stonegate, several uneventful hours were enough for the caravan to relax. Conversation returned to the passenger wagons, followers drifted into loose groups along the road, and some of the hired guards stopped watching the trees with quite the same intensity. The road itself offered little reason for comfort. It wound between steep forested slopes, narrowing against exposed stone before opening beneath tall pines.

Settlements had disappeared almost entirely, and broken ground allowed the forest to conceal anything that moved more than a short distance from the road. Joe remained attentive, as did Brann and Master Vey. Brann stayed near the center of the caravan while Vey rode closer to the front. Neither appeared alarmed, but their attention moved constantly between the road, the slopes, and the canopy. Joe noticed the birds shortly before Vey stopped. A flock rose abruptly from the eastern trees and crossed the valley.

Another followed, then a smaller cluster farther ahead. Different species, all moving west. Joe straightened. Vey had already turned in his saddle. Brann looked toward the eastern slope a moment later.

"Close the formation!" The caravan reacted quickly. Drivers drew the wagons inward while guards moved the protected travellers toward the center. Standard passenger wagons closed around them, and followers were ordered to remain along the outer edges of the convoy. For several breaths, nothing appeared. Then a deer burst from the trees, crossed the road at full speed, and disappeared down the opposite slope. Two more followed, then several others. The guards did not attack.

The animals barely seemed aware of the caravan. They were fleeing.

"Keep moving!" Brann shouted. The first boars reached the road before the wagons had properly started again. Most were ordinary animals driven beyond caution by fear, and the guards redirected as many as they could with spear shafts, shouts, and carefully placed strikes. One crashed into a cartwheel hard enough to split the outer rim. Another knocked a follower from his feet before disappearing between the wagons.

The formation contracted around the protected section, exactly as the caravan master had described at Stonegate. A violent shaking in the undergrowth drew Joe's attention uphill. A much larger boar broke through the brush. Scars covered its hide, and Blood Energy strengthened the thick body beneath them. The smaller animals scattered from its path as it charged toward the road. Brann intercepted it. He gave the beast no opportunity to use its weight directly.

He shifted aside at the last moment, turned its momentum, struck behind the shoulder, and moved clear before its tusks could follow. When the boar twisted back toward him, Brann had already repositioned. His movements were economical rather than impressive, the product of someone who had fought dangerous beasts before. Another crash came from farther ahead. A second blooded boar had entered the road near the front of the caravan. Master Vey stepped toward it.

Compared with Brann's exchange, his movement looked almost casual. He advanced once and delivered a short strike with little visible preparation. The boar recoiled violently. Joe watched the result more closely than the movement itself. The external impact had been limited, yet the force had clearly penetrated beneath the surface. An Jin. Before either blooded beast could recover, a roar carried over the ridge. It came from somewhere deeper in Greyspine, distant enough that Joe could not identify its source.

The reaction around them mattered more. Both blooded boars abandoned the road. The forest erupted after them. Animals began pouring downhill in numbers that made the earlier groups insignificant. Deer, boars, smaller beasts, and predators that would normally have hunted one another all fled in the same direction. Branches snapped beneath their passage, loose stones scattered across the slope, and the pounding of hooves merged with shouting from the caravan.

Whatever remained beyond the ridge had frightened an entire section of the mountainside. The guards could control individual animals. They could not control this. The followers broke first. Some ran uphill, others downhill. Pack animals tore free of their handlers, and one man turned back for fallen baggage despite the warnings given at Stonegate. A wagon tipped when its draft animal tried to turn across the road, forcing the carts behind it to stop or veer aside.

The protected travellers remained concentrated around Brann and Vey. Standard passengers received what protection the larger formation could maintain. Beyond them, the outer line dissolved into frightened people, animals, and scattered cargo. Joe's wagon jerked sideways as one of the draft animals began fighting its harness.

"Off!" the driver shouted. The passengers jumped down. Several people were already climbing the slope away from the road, and Joe went with them. He kept to a speed appropriate for the Muscle Completion cultivation he had shown publicly until trees and broken ground obscured the caravan behind him. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Then he accelerated.

Bone Great Completion carried him easily across terrain that would have slowed an ordinary Muscle practitioner. He still kept far below his true limits, but there was no reason to remain near the road while the beast tide passed through it. A frightened animal crossed ahead of him, and Joe simply changed direction. Fighting something that was fleeing the same danger served no purpose. The sounds of the caravan faded as he climbed.

Occasional shouts and heavy impacts still carried through the trees, enough to suggest Brann and Vey were holding what remained of the formation together. Joe continued uphill until something unfamiliar brushed against his awareness. He slowed beside a gray outcrop. At first he suspected the uneven climb had affected his balance, but the sensation returned when he stood still. It was faint and difficult to define, with none of the pressure he associated with Blood Energy.

There was no sound or scent attached to it either. When Joe moved several paces left, it disappeared. Returning brought it back. He tested another direction and found that the sensation strengthened slightly before fading once he went too far. There was a source. He began tracing it through the slope, correcting his direction whenever the sensation weakened.

Descriptions of spiritual energy surfaced in his memory, but words such as purity, vitality, and resonance were nearly useless when he had never experienced what the authors were describing. Whatever this was, it was not Blood Energy. The trail eventually brought him to a section of mountainside damaged by spring thaw. Pale stone had been exposed beneath the weathered surface, and several large slabs had broken away into the surrounding trees. The unfamiliar sensation was strongest there.

Joe searched the exposed rock until he noticed a narrow darkness behind one of the fallen slabs. The gap extended farther into the mountain than an ordinary crack should have. He checked the forest below. The road was no longer visible, and neither people nor animals were nearby. Joe entered. The passage widened several paces inside into a dry natural chamber. Dust still covered much of the stone floor, and the stale air suggested the opening had remained sealed for years.

A human skeleton rested against the far wall beneath a shallow stone shelf. Joe approached carefully. Enough clothing remained in the driest areas to show that the body had not been exposed to weather, while a collapsed travel bag lay near one hip. From the bones, Joe estimated the dead person had been a young adult, probably somewhere in his twenties. He saw no obvious sign of an animal attack and nothing in the chamber immediately explained the death. A metal token lay among the remains. Joe picked it up.

A crowned mountain had been engraved beneath a seven-pointed star. Montclair. On the reverse, a smaller mark identified the Ashbourne branch. Joe looked again at the skeleton. A young member of the Montclair line had died alone inside Greyspine, carrying enough personal identification that there was little chance of mistaking his origin. That made the ruined travel bag considerably more interesting.

Most of the leather and cloth had decayed, but several protected objects remained intact: two sealed document cases, a hardened credential, a handful of personal items, and six individually wrapped stones. The moment Joe touched one of the wrapped stones, the sensation that had led him to the chamber became unmistakable. He removed the covering carefully.

The stone felt cool in his palm, but the unfamiliar energy within it was dense enough that he could now distinguish it clearly from everything he had experienced through martial cultivation. Joe focused on it. For an instant, the sensation sharpened. A sudden discomfort travelled through his hand and forearm, and he released the stone at once. The feeling faded without leaving any obvious injury. Joe wrapped the stone again rather than repeat the experiment. Spirit stones were the obvious possibility.

If these were condensed spiritual resources, six gathered in one place could easily explain the sensation that had drawn him toward the chamber. Why he had been able to detect them at all was a separate question, one he had no reason to answer before taking the Spiritual Root test in Ashbourne. He turned to the first document case. The Montclair crest appeared on its seal. Inside was a complete martial inheritance. Joe paused over the index. Muscle Tempering, Bone Tempering, Internal Organs, Acquired, and Innate.

For years, he had built his understanding from whatever Blackwood could provide: incomplete methods, medical knowledge, observation, experimentation, and fragments collected from people who had never possessed access to a complete higher inheritance. Now one lay in his hands. Joe continued through the index until another heading caught his attention. Repeated Tempering and Layer Requirements. He opened the section.

The text discussed second, third, and fourth tempering, along with the requirements linking the different layers of the body. It warned against strengthening later layers without sufficient preparation beneath them and described how repeated tempering altered the demands of later advancement. Joe read several passages twice. The important discovery was not that repeated tempering worked. He already knew that better than the author could have convinced him.

What mattered was that powerful martial inheritances recognized it as an established path. That raised a more interesting question. The methods before him described only a limited number of repetitions, while Joe had already gone far beyond them. Whether those limits came from resources, physical strain, method design, or something else would require a proper reading. He closed the section rather than rush through it. The second case was thinner. Its title immediately drew his attention. Root Kindling.

The opening pages clarified the basic purpose of the method. Root Kindling could not create a Spiritual Root. It could only improve one that already existed. Joe's planned test in Ashbourne therefore remained necessary. He read farther and repeatedly encountered the same two ideas: the twenty-seventh year and the use of a martial foundation as fuel.

The method appeared to sacrifice part of what a martial artist had built within the body to improve an existing Spiritual Root, provided the process was completed before the relevant age limit. That was enough for now. Between the inheritance, the repeated tempering records, Root Kindling, and the probable spirit stones, Joe had found more higher-level martial knowledge in the chamber than Blackwood could have offered him in years.

Reading it properly would take time, privacy, and considerably more caution than he could afford while separated from a damaged caravan. The forest outside had also grown quieter. Joe packed both document cases into his bag, followed by the six wrapped stones. The Montclair token and surviving credential went into a separate compartment. Before leaving, he looked once more at the skeleton.

The dead man had been young, belonged to the Ashbourne branch of Montclair, and had died carrying possessions valuable enough that someone should have come looking for him. Joe had found evidence, not an explanation. He left the chamber and descended toward the road. The damage appeared before the surviving caravan did. Broken cargo lay among the trees, a frightened pack animal wandered with rope trailing from its harness, and farther down the slope several men struggled around a wagon resting partly on its side.

The caravan had survived, but not everyone travelling with it had. Several people were injured, others remained missing, and groups of followers called names into the forest while guards counted survivors. A few bodies had already been covered beside the road. The protected center had fared far better. Most of its travellers remained close to the intact wagons, shaken but unharmed. Brann was still standing, though his torn clothing and exhaustion showed how heavily he had been involved in the fighting.

Vey appeared irritated more than tired. A guard noticed Joe coming down the slope.

"Passenger?"

"Yes."

"Standard?"

"Yes." The guard looked him over.

"Injured?"

"No." His gaze lingered briefly on Joe's dirty clothing.

"Lucky." Joe gave him no reason to think otherwise and returned to the surviving standard passengers while the caravan reorganized. Perrin's remark from Stonegate returned to him. Fear was good business, although whatever danger the caravan company had expected, the beast tide had gone well beyond a routine mountain crossing. Joe rested a hand against his bag and could still faintly sense the six wrapped stones inside.

He could neither manipulate nor absorb their energy, and his Spiritual Root remained unconfirmed, but one fact was no longer uncertain. He had sensed them. And that sensation had led him to the first inheritance he had ever seen that reached all the way to Innate.