Chương 36: The Second Crossing

Three weeks bought more than I expected them to. Cosmic-Wave stopped feeling like a technique somewhere in the second week and started feeling like an extension of breathing instead, Qi folding into every motion so cleanly that training without it had begun to feel like walking with one boot off. Dragon Slayer's First Verse no longer cost me a torn meridian every time I called on it the backlash still came, still hurt, but it no longer threatened to take an arm with it on the way out.

Small mercies, hard-earned, exactly the kind Dororo had promised me two centuries of careful study eventually taught a person to appreciate. Congratulations: Cultivation Increased Level: Mortal Realm — Seventh Leaf Peak of the Mortal Realm. One more full breakthrough away from a threshold I still didn't fully understand the shape of, and considerably closer to it than I'd been standing in an academy courtyard getting laughed at for an Avatar everyone assumed was small.

Ember had grown too, in the quieter way that was easy to miss day to day and impossible to miss all at once wings steadier now, flight sustained instead of frantic bursts, a low, warning growl that had actual weight behind it instead of simply sounding indignant. Small, still. But small in the way a blade is small before someone finally learns to swing it properly.

I packed for the Tower the way I should have the first time dried rations enough for a week rather than three days, waterskins lined with a minor cooling formation Elder Shu had insisted on teaching me before I left, a proper desert cloak instead of academy robes never built for three suns at once. Preparation, this time, instead of desperation carrying me through.

Dororo saw me off with considerably less dry commentary than usual, which told me more than any actual words could have about how seriously he'd taken everything since the missing student's room.

"I'll keep pulling at the monastery thread while you're gone," he said, "and I'll keep an eye on our curved-blade friend, from a careful enough distance that he won't notice he's being watched." He studied me a moment longer over those dark lenses.

"Come back with an answer, child. Not a story about how close you came to one." Ellia found me at the Tower's entrance itself, arms crossed, doing her best impression of composure and failing at it slightly around the edges.

"Second time's supposed to be easier," she said.

"That's the rule, isn't it?"

"I'll let you know."

"You'd better." She didn't reach for my hand this time, though something in the way she stood close enough to almost do it told me the impulse hadn't gone anywhere.

"Three days, Len Fan. If you're not out by the fourth, I'm telling the Patriarch myself, and I don't think either of us wants to explain to him why that became necessary."

"Duly noted." She held my gaze a moment longer than the goodbye strictly required, then stepped back and let me go, and I carried the weight of that small, steady worry with me through the gate the same way I carried everything else that actually mattered these day quietly, carefully, without setting it down even once. The academy's registrar barely glanced up when I requested re-entry to the Magic Tower's third floor, until she caught sight of the dark stone token I set on the counter beside my name.

"Guardian-recognized," she said, studying it a moment longer than the paperwork strictly required, turning it once between two fingers like she half-expected it to do something.

"We don't see many of these. Most students who earn one never go back a second time half of them are too rattled to consider it, and the other half simply don't survive long enough to." She slid the token back across the counter without further comment, though something in her expression suggested she'd just filed away a story she intended to repeat to someone else before the day was out. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Most students didn't have a reason worth the trip," I said, and left before she could ask what mine was. The desert hit differently the second time. Not gentler three suns still hung low and merciless over the same endless gold, heat still warping the horizon into something that lied about distance on principle.

But I crossed the first stretch of it with the Divine God's Eye already dark and expected, no wasted moment spent startled by its absence this time, Cosmic-Wave pulling whatever thin trickle of Qi it could manage from a place that seemed determined not to offer any. The sand serpents found me on the second day, same as before, three long shapes breaking the surface in a spray of gold. Enemy Identified: Sand Serpent Cultivation: Mortal Realm — Seventh Leaf Seventh Leaf.

My own Leaf now, for the first time since I'd first crossed this floor half-starved and outmatched by three full realms. I didn't run this time. I planted my feet in shifting sand that refused to hold still for anyone, and let Cosmic-Wave answer the first strike with something considerably closer to an even trade than pure desperate survival. The fight cost me most of an hour and a shallow gash along one forearm. It didn't cost me my supplies, my water, or three full days of blind wandering.

The serpents fought the way I remembered segmented plates grinding against each other with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat, submerging and resurfacing at angles designed to punish anyone who tracked them by sight alone instead of by the tremor they left in the sand itself. Cosmic-Wave caught what Qi it could between strikes, thin and grudging against a floor that seemed determined not to offer any, but thin was still considerably more than the nothing I'd had to work with the first time through.

I dropped the third serpent with a clean strike through a gap in its plating that I wouldn't have found without months of drilling the same basic forms until they'd stopped being forms and started being instinct. It didn't die easily. Nothing on this floor seemed to. But it retreated, finally, sliding back beneath the dunes with the other two, and left me standing in settling sand with my breath ragged but my supplies intact.

When the last serpent finally gave up the chase, I was still standing, still hydrated, and considerably less impressed with myself than the moment probably deserved three suns and an unforgiving floor had a way of stripping the satisfaction out of even a fair fight. By the end of the second day, the pyramid rose out of the heat haze exactly where memory said it would, sharp-angled and patient against a sky gone the color of a fresh bruise as evening settled in.

I crossed the threshold with considerably more strength left in my legs than I'd had the first time, and the desert's heat cut off behind me the same way it always had cool stone air, old dust, silence with real weight to it. Authority Restored. Divine God's Eye — Reactivated. Gold spread across my vision, and I felt it before the Eye even finished confirming it the bracelet on my wrist warming, slow and certain, the same quiet recognition it had shown the last time I'd crossed into this exact chamber.

"You're awake this time," I murmured to it, following the familiar mist trail deeper into the pyramid's cool dark.

"Let's hope that means you've got more to say than you did the first time." The passage opened, eventually, into the same wide chamber lit by torches that caught flame on their own as I entered, and a figure was already waiting at its center easily eight feet tall, skin the color of old bronze, robes marking him as something between soldier and monk.

Onbu turned toward me before I'd finished crossing the threshold, and this time, something in his ancient, patient expression looked less like mild curiosity and more like a man who'd been quietly, deliberately expecting this exact visit for considerably longer than the past two days had actually taken perhaps, I thought, for as long as the fragment on my wrist had existed at all.

"Child of the fragment," he said, voice like stone grinding against stone.

"You've grown since last we spoke." His eyes dropped once to the bracelet, warm and glowing faint gold against my wrist, and something ancient and careful settled behind his gaze.

"And you've finally come asking the right question, unless I am very much mistaken about why a boy your age crosses my sand a second time on purpose." I held very still, the whole desperate, patient shape of the last two years condensing down into a single, careful breath, every hour of training and every night spent watching shadows finally arriving at the one question that actually mattered.

"I need to find the Greyhold," I said.

"And I think you already know exactly where it is."