Chương 13: A Wager Before the Strom

Ch 13: A Wager Before the Strom Sunlight hit me like a physical blow the moment I stepped out of the Tower, too soft and too honest after three days of sand and stone dark. I stood there blinking against it, half-convinced I'd forgotten what ordinary daylight looked like. A crowd had gathered outside most of the academy, by the look of it, packed shoulder to shoulder around the Tower's base in a silence that broke the instant someone spotted me.

"He's alive—""He came out. He actually came out—""That's not possible, he entered the tower at second Leaf, look at him now—" I hadn't realized, until the murmurs started stacking on top of each other, how visible the change actually was. Mortal Realm, Fifth Leaf. From where I'd walked in three days ago. Someone near the front did the math out loud, badly, and went pale doing it.

"Young Master Kalio only reached Sixth Leaf this morning," a girl whispered somewhere behind me, "and he's had his Immortal Avatar the whole time." I didn't have the energy left to enjoy it properly. My legs still ached from seven straight hours of getting knocked down by something Divine Realm, and every part of me wanted a bed more than it wanted an audience.

The crowd parted before I'd gone ten steps, and the Vortexian Patriarch stood waiting at the center of the gap they'd left not as mist and pressure this time, but in the flesh, an old man with a swordsman's build and eyes that missed nothing. Beside him, a cluster of academy elders watched me the way you'd watch something that had wandered out of a story instead of a battlefield.

"... No," the Patriarch said, staring at me like he was recalculating something in real time.

"You fought on the third floor. And you're not dead."

"You sound disappointed, Senior."

"Hardly." He recovered fast enough that I almost missed the flicker of relief underneath the surprise.

"I simply didn't expect to be paying out this particular debt so soon." He gestured, and one of the elders stepped forward with a heavy chest, setting it down at my feet with a grunt.

"Twelve hundred Mortal Cultivation Pills. As promised. Whatever waits inside that floor belongs to you as well I trust it found you, given the state of you."

"It did." I didn't elaborate. Onbu could stay between me and the desert for now. The Patriarch studied me a moment longer, then cleared his throat in a way that immediately set off every alarm I had left.

"There is... one other matter. Small. Practically nothing." He was already not meeting my eyes.

"Have you given any thought to marriage?" The silence that followed had a texture to it.

"Father." Ellia's voice cut through the crowd before I could decide whether that question deserved an answer at all, mortification written across her face in a color I hadn't seen on her before.

"We are not doing this here." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"I only meant—"" Father." She had him by the sleeve and half-dragged toward the elders before he finished his sentence, muttering apologies to nobody in particular the whole way. Ellia turned back just long enough to catch my eye, and for one unguarded second, whatever expression she'd been holding back from her father slipped through instead not embarrassment this time. Something quieter, and considerably more dangerous to my concentration than anything Onbu had thrown at me in that pyramid.

"... Sorry about him," she said, and was gone before I could find anything worth saying back. I stood there a second longer than I meant to, chest doing something Cosmic-Wave had no technique for, before I remembered I had roughly three hours left before I was supposed to be standing across from Kalio in front of half the kingdom. The dorm room was quiet, at least.

I dropped the chest of pills on the floor, sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, and started eating them the way a starving man eats bread no ceremony, no pacing, just one after another until the count in my head stopped meaning anything. By the time I'd gone through a hundred of them, the System had opinions about it. WARNING Host has consumed an excessive quantity of pills in a short interval. Immediate circulation strongly advised.

"Working on it," I muttered, and pulled myself upright on legs that still hadn't fully forgiven me for the desert. I drew my sword and dropped into the opening stance of Moon's Verse —>an old B-Rank form from a life and a world that didn't exist here, the same technique that had once put a crescent scar through a mountain and layered Cosmic-Wave underneath it exactly the way I had beneath that maple tree on my first real day in this world.

Qi surged the instant the two techniques locked together, ripping through a hundred pills' worth of raw cultivation and folding it into meridians that groaned under the sudden weight of it. Thirty minutes. My robes were soaked through by the end, and my hands wouldn't stop shaking, but every drop of it had gone somewhere useful instead of sitting in my stomach doing nothing. I checked what time I had left. Two hours.

I let myself lie flat on the floor for exactly one of them, staring at the ceiling, and didn't think about Kalio at all. I thought about a bracelet that had recognized a stranger's floor guardian on sight, and a girl who'd looked back at me like she wanted an answer I hadn't given her yet. Then I got up, and went to go lose or win a duel.

The stadium was already full by the time I arrived, tiered stone seating packed shoulder to shoulder around a wide circular arena, banners from a dozen noble houses snapping overhead in a wind that smelled like dust and anticipation. Betting stalls ran the length of the outer wall, coins changing hands faster than the runners could shout the odds. Almost all of it favored Kalio.

That much was obvious from twenty meters out his name called again and again, his Immortal Avatar cited like it settled the argument before either of us had drawn a blade. A hooded figure stood near the largest of the betting stalls, plain gray cloth wrapped from jaw to hairline. I slapped down a sum large enough to make the runner behind the counter actually look up from his ledger.

"A hundred and twenty thousand teals," I said, voice pitched low, "on Len Fan." The runner blinked.

"You're certain? The odds on that boy are—""Let the show begin." I didn't wait for him to recalculate the odds. I was already walking toward the arena's edge, unwinding the cloth from my face as the announcer's voice rolled out across the stadium and the crowd noise dropped into something closer to held breath.

Kalio was already waiting at the center of the ring when I stepped over the low wall and onto the sand, Immortal Avatar coiled visibly behind him like a second shadow, arms folded, a smile on his face that had clearly been rehearsed for this exact moment for weeks.

"So you came," he said. I smiled back, and drew my sword.

"Let's start the duel."