A cultivator-thug itched at his bandages, sitting down in a cheap fast food restaurant.

He was enraptured with his phone, the "food" he ordered long forgotten as video played across the screen and useless commentary filled his ears through the wireless earbuds he used.

He leaned in a concerning amount, his eyes darting across the screen and taking in the form of Nash Emerald.

More news about the case had been uncovered, and while the Emeralds refused to admit that it was a runaway situation and not a kidnapping (and thus the major news sources followed along,) the fact remained that there had been a chase between an Emerald retainer and Nash (as well as the kidnappers, according to the official narrative) had occurred.

The thug greedily drank in every drop of information he could find, quickly enmeshing himself within the standard online gossip-rings and wringing them for every bit he could, watching and re-watching blurry, shaky cellphone-camera videos of fights and him at a dead run.

He read message histories of servers reaching back to when Nash had first really entered the public consciousness, following trails of friends-of-a-friends that 'knew something' about the Nash case. Mostly, these searches ended in failure - deleted servers, lost conversations, simple lies.

Other times, it was insignificant; a quick, blurry photo snapped of him from far away, in the parking lot fight or otherwise.

Twice, he had caught the trail of more significant discoveries, ones that hadn't percolated into most of the internet yet; one was a video of him and an old man fighting that seemed to get servers disappeared whenever it got posted in too much of a high-profile manner.

The other was something that actually came to him through his criminal contacts; the Boss of the Crimson Bonfire gang had put out a large bounty for his head, and his usually rather predictable spikes and troughs of lunacy had seemed to begin on an upward trend with no signs of stopping.

The two were obviously related, and the thug had gone through all of the higher members of the Crimson Bonfire Gang he knew personally and pumped them for any information they had, and had acquired little new information that would help him locate the Emerald scion.

But he would find him. He would find him soon. He had to, or what was the point of continuing to live like this?

No. He had to find his idol. He had to kill him, to become something greater.

He could bear to be lesser no longer.

----------------------------------------

Nash's apartment had recently been furnished with a few cheap, lidded plastic tubs, one of which had been filled with dry foods such as uncooked rice and the other which had been filled with vegetables.

In the store, he had realized rather suddenly that having food would be of little use to him without anything to actually cook it in, so he had grabbed a cheap rice cooker and an even cheaper cast iron skillet. Even those purchases cut tight enough into his budget that they nearly hurt, but they were unfortunately necessary.

An alarm rang out from his phone, and he closed his notepad, still mulling over considerations about the various finer points of his plan for integrating the principles of materialization into his cultivation.

He launched himself into shadowboxing, into calisthenics, to whatever exercises he could do with his limited equipment (that being none) and limited space.

In his mind, he counted down the time until the next match was to take place.

He had to be ready for it, or he had to find another way to make money.

Either had their disadvantages. He could fight and risk injury, or he could work and risk discovery.

But fighting? That, he enjoyed.

Fighting and winning was proof of his efforts, an irrevocable demonstration of how his cultivation had grown, a physical method to both measure and use the honing of his body and his skills.

Fighting and losing stung, yes, but each time he did he would only learn more and more, becoming stronger and stronger until he never lost again, either due to his death or his invincibility.

It disturbed him how much that thought appealed to him.

That disconcerting emotion did little to dissuade the rest of his psyche from practically yelling at him in a cacophony of excitement, of anxiety, of simple anticipation.

----------------------------------------

A vine grew and grew, moving sinuously through the dirt above the concrete shell of an old system of subway tunnels.

At the end of the vine was a bulbous, lidless eye that plowed through the dirt in front of it, evidently less fragile than the similar organ found in animals of all sorts.

Every so often, the eye would dip down slightly, scraping against the top of the concrete to reorient itself. More than once, the eye disappeared into the Aether, extending perpendicular to reality, growing through the ceiling of the subway, and looking into the vast expanse of empty subterranean hollows, dead capillaries for a heart that was never fully built and left to rot to the current day.

It never stayed inside the tunnel long, seemingly hesitant to meet with the rot that permeated the system.

That rot was percolated into the very concrete, which still carried the stains of blood.

Despite that even that shedding of lives had dried and flaked off long ago, despite how present those memories still were in those old enough to experience it personally.

Each time it entered the tunnel again, the pupil dilated and contracted repeatedly, focusing.

Its gaze moved madly across the invisible trail it followed, looking for something that even most cultivators couldn't even sense.

The endlessly extruding vine eventually reached one part of the system, one were the stench of rot had been covered up with a thin film of alcohol, fresher blood, and vomit. The place was mostly deserted at the point of time that the vine slithered in, the only occupants of the platform being a few rough-looking men in motorcycle helmets.

They lazily ambled through the empty stands, pushing brooms or rolling mop buckets. The cleaning they did was not deep; they simply mopped up the worst of the vomit and discarded any obvious broken glass, plus whatever other trash had been picked up by their brooms.

The eye at the end of the vine locked into place, going "sideways" once more but only halfway, burying itself partially in the concrete. It watched as each one eventually filtered out, the last one flicking a switch on a generator.

He coiled up some wire and hose and set it down messily before leaving, barring the door behind him.

Old Man Looking-In glanced through the semi-autonomous extension of his cultivation and then glanced away.

There was much waiting to do until he could see how Young Greenstone had grown.

----------------------------------------

The newly-promoted Second of the Crimson Bonfire Gang stood in front of the door to the Boss's cultivation chamber, hesitating.

One hand held a tablet, and the other was poised to knock on the door, but seemed to be frozen in time just before it hit the wood.

Every time he built up his courage, he reared that hand back.

Every time he began moving it forward to finally touch the door, his courage left him, stopping just before the wood in a frankly impressive display of precision.

Eventually, his precision failed, and he managed to knock on the door lightly by complete accident.

By then, he was committed, so he knocked for real, no matter how much the sound of each strike on the door intensified the palpitations running through his anxious heart.

The door creaked open.

The Boss was on the other side. His grotesque, sharp, blackened teeth were on full display. His knuckles were bloody, his stance was off, and he smelled like smoke, tar, and alcohol.

"Sir," the Second said, feeling the words he meant to come next catch in his throat.

"My treasure," the Boss said, and the Second could not tell whether the words were a lament or a growl of anger.

Suddenly, he was pulled into the room, the door shutting behind him. He was released and backed off from the Boss, doubting that the man's normal volatility would decrease when he was obviously drunk.

Seemingly, his escape was only allowed to due to the Boss taking a swig from a bottle of hard liquor.

"My treasure," the Boss said again, this time the words coming out as a sob.

He dropped the bottle of alcohol on the ground and it shattered, liquor splattering out and soaking the pant legs of both the men present.

He lunged, grabbing the Second's shirt with both his hands and wringing the fabric in his hands. "My treasure is broken!"

Those words had come out not with a sob, but with a yell, the Boss letting go of his Second and pushing him away, sending him careening towards the wall. Both stumbled; the Second from being pushed, the Boss from his inebriation.

"Well, Sir," the Second said nervously, trying to soothe the drunken Boss. "What treasure do you mean? You are the leader of the Crimson Bonfire Gang - give the order, and I will simply instruct your men to get you another one, regardless of the cost."

That was the wrong move.

The Second only managed to sidestep the wild haymaker because off the Boss being impaired; his heart jumped in his chest as he saw the Boss's fist go through the wall where the Second had just been standing, carving a trough filled with billowing smoke.

"Won't work," the Boss said, once again sobbing. He grabbed the Second and dragged him once again, and this time the Second was too terrified to break away.

"Look at it," he said, inconsolable.

He pointed to an odd crystal with a massive crack down the center, into two halves held together with barbed wire wrapped around it and the stand holding it up. A thin coil of smoke drifted from the deepest point of the crack, dissipating into the ceiling and drawing away from the roiling, billowing clouds contained within the crystal.

"The smith came again. 'Impossible,' he said, that SMUG -" the Boss's curse was cut off by another round of sobbing.

"Where's the whisky?" he asked, oily tears saturated with black smoke dripping down his rough, scarred face.

"It was spilled, Sir," the Second said, carefully. His report forgotten, he tucked the tablet under his arm. "Sir, do you want me to grab you some more?"

"No, no," the Boss said, standing up straight, wiping the tears off with his smoke-blackened arm, leaving streaks of soot across his face. "Why are you here? Where's my Second?" A sudden clarity came over him, and his hand gripped tighter around the Second, his eyes wild but focused and his grip strong enough to bruise.

"I am your Second, Boss. My predecessor died during the hit on the cashier, Sir."

"Ah." The Boss's grip relaxed, and he turned around, suddenly seeming a lot more sober than should have been possible in that amount of time.

More smoke emitted from his pores, though this smelled even more oddly than normal; it smelled of alcohol. Is he expelling it? the Second wondered.

He quickly abandoned that thought a few seconds later when the Boss, having collected himself, spoke again. "Yes, I did appoint you, didn't I? You better hope you can live up to the title - there are consequences if you do not. Now, any news about the defiant little trash?"

"That's actually why I'm here, Sir."

"Well? Out with it."

"We believe that he may be hiding somewhere within the Motorcycle Rider's turf. There is a new contender in the arena they run, consistent with his cultivation level and, from what we know of it from the previous Second's special contact, has a somewhat similar fighting style."

The Boss groaned under his breath. "That may be... Troublesome. They have been a thorn in my side for long." He walked forward and gingerly brushed his hand against the side of the crystal. "Send some to investigate and confirm, but do not engage - he's mine. Now, go, I have matters to attend to."

The Second nodded, feeling quite embarrassed upon realizing there was little point in body language for someone who could not see you.

Instead of doubling down, he turned around and left the room, but he could swear he heard the Boss mutter a short phrase under his breath as he closed the door.

"Maybe things will start going right for me again after that rat is put into the ground..."

----------------------------------------

Eidolon stood once again inside of the roped-off wooden platform that made up the actual ring of the underground (in both senses) arena.

When he had his first match, the audience had been more skeptical, jeers and boos resounding through the building as they cheered on his opponent. This time, he was watched carefully, the crowd still loud but mostly talking amongst themselves instead of interacting with him directly.

Questions were asked, jokes were made, money changed hands as bets were made, but it was all oddly muted.

Underneath it all was an odd apprehension mixed with excitement for the next fight - would the newcomer turn out to replicate his feat, or was it a fluke? Was he a poser that thought too highly of himself, or simply didn't think enough of the arena to bother playing the games every other one of the participants did?

This time, he wasn't the newcomer not being taken seriously. Now, he was the unexpected variable, the freak circumstance that came out of nowhere. His every move was followed with a sense of the audience's anticipation and expectations clinging to him like water soaking his clothes and weighing him down.

But no matter. Here came his opponent.

"Now, I know everyone's excited to see how this next match is going, especially since it involves Eidolon, our mysterious newcomer," the announcer said, apparently incapable of saying anything in a volume lower than that of a megaphone.

He swaggered around the ring, eventually freezing in one place and pointing at one particular person in the crowd. "But like many of the finer things in life, it takes more than one person to fight! Now, I'd like everyone to make it clear exactly what they think of our other contestant, the one and only DISCORDANT SCREAM!"

An odd little man stepped up to ring, stepping under the ropes.

His face was incredibly pale, his hair was patchy and receding, and he was even shorter than the announcer. He had a beard, but it was a small, scraggly thing, located almost entirely in a small encirclement of his too-wide mouth. He was dressed in ragged, cheap clothes; a white tank top, faded, hole-filled denim pants and foam-bottomed sandals.

The tank top in particular showed how scrawny he was, bordering on malnutrition, with barely a shred of either muscle or fat visible on his physique. Under his eyes, dark bags had formed, mixing with bruises and other discolorations.

Despite all of that, when Nash looked at him with his Greater Luminiferous Vision, he had a rather high cultivation, at least for this place. Early Second Calcification, probably just broke through, Nash/Eidolon thought, considering his foe. But how does he look like that at his cultivation level? Plus, his channels look....

The scrawny man's channels looked less like a healthy root system and more like a sickly, shrunken, unorganized ball of Aether-stuff.

What? Nash thought, incredulous. How did he get to the Second - no, scratch that. How's he still ALIVE with that?

A mixture of cheers and jeers came from the crowd, though while their reaction was more pronounced for Discordant Scream than it was for Eidolon, it was much less positive.

Indeed, the crowd seemed uninclined to even give the man a chance at all, yelling insults over each other; mostly, these insults concerned his height or his scrawniness, though another consistent theme was accusing him of being a "dishonorable freak."

"I won't waste any more of these two beloved fighter's time," the announcer said, stepping out of the ring. An undercurrent of sarcasm was carried through his words; obviously, both of the people remaining in the ring had caused problems for him or his gang in some manner.

Probably just hoping one of us doesn't come out.

"And... FIGHT!"

Immediately, Eidolon rocketed forward, already sliding forward with a thrusting snap kick aimed just below Discordant Scream's sternum - he had no wish to find out whatever tricks the little man could pull that got him through his time in the arena.

Discordant Scream opened his mouth.

A terrible sound filled Nash's ears.

The sound set his teeth on edge.

His gut felt too-heavy and too-light, a tightness in his torso. Air hurt to suck into his lungs, all of his nerve endings felt not pain but a profound sense of wrong.

It felt like he was biting into felt or like something sickly smooth was brushing up against his skin.

The torturous sound continued, eliciting feelings beyond the jurisdiction of his ears. It felt like the dust of crushed chalk covered all of his skin, shoved under his fingernails until they could fit no more and then forced again, poured into his mouth to dry it out. It felt like a slurry was formed between his soured saliva and the bitter chalk, the gritty substance clinging to the roof of his mouth and between his teeth. A torn piece of silk sewed to sandpaper was forced between every gap of his teeth and pulled, the terrible smoothness gliding along his gums contrasting with the scratching on the enamel of his teeth, like the disgusting sensation of a fork scratching alongside a tooth in a miscalculated bite, only magnified a million million times.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Then, it passed.

Eidolon stood from the floor that he had unknowingly fallen onto. He looked into the audience, and saw that many of them still had fingers plugged into his ears; some enterprising individuals were going through the crowd and offering earplugs for a ridiculous markup.

Eidolon looked towards his opponent, panting, wishing to spit the phantom pains and tastes outside of his mask-covered mouth but being unable to. Discordant Scream spoke.

"Impressive," he said. and even these words had a tinge of Aether to them that once again threatened to set Nash's teeth on edge, but did nothing more. "That was a rather powerful one. It took a lot of my power to get past your cultivation, though once I did I was much less impressed - you were incapacitated almost immediately."

Nash didn't bother to respond. He returned to a fighting stance, but this time he moved his ears and inner ears into the Aether. The emaciated cultivator spoke once again, but Nash was quite literally deaf to it; he could see the panic rise in the other cultivator's eyes, but Nash's strike was handily dodged.

Eidolon's movements still felt subtly off from the assault on his senses, and fighting felt weightless, somehow - likely a result of much of his balance-mediating ears being inside the Aether, where gravity didn't exactly have sway.

Eidolon's attacks were slow, off balance, somewhat inept from the sudden reduction in how much data his brain had to utilize, but they were enough to drive Discordant Scream into one corner, coupled with his advantages in both cultivation and size.

He threw technique after sloppy technique at the smaller man, cursing the narrow field of vision brought by his mask - it was much more of an issue when hearing and parts of his balance weren't available.

Despite those limitations, however, it was quite obvious that he was now winning.

Punch after punch, elbow after elbow (as Nash didn't trust himself with kicks or knees currently) collided with the smaller man, each one at least bruising him while many broke bones. The smaller man reached out, trying to yank Eidolon's head down and force it into a headlock.

Eidolon simply went with the direction of force, dipping down and reaching his arms around in a double-leg takedown, ready to slam Discordant Scream onto the hard wood below them both.

Desolate Scream's fingers brushed up against Nash's head, where his ears were missing.

The mental attack happened again.

His fingernails bent backwards. The gaps in his perfect teeth were filled with sand and his throat filled with cough syrup.

This time, Nash was prepared enough to remain standing during the sensory havoc, but could do little more; he scrabbled to grab for the other cultivator, but he sprawled away from Nash's grip, keeping his hands in contact with Eidolon's hood. In an effort to keep control over the sensations, Nash's fingernails pressed deep into his palms and his jaw clenched even as his still-closed hands raised to his head to try and rip off Discordant Scream's hands.

A knee crashed into his undefended solar plexus, crumpling Nash.

He was pushed away while still reeling from the knee strike, which was immediately followed by a push kick that sent him stumbling backward across the ring. At the end of his recoiling struggle, when he had just started to come to from the sensory assault, Discordant Scream charged in once again, reaching his hands out to grab Eidolon once again.

Giving up on keeping his ears out of attackable range for the moment, he brought them back to reality and dodged as gracefully as he could manage to one side, collecting himself while Discordant Scream recovered from his own charge.

Eidolon was the first to seize the initiative, stepping forward to get his heel into position and sending a devastating spinning hook into the short man's chin, making him sway in his feet.

As soon as he landed, he kicked again, this time to the legs; a sickening snap reverberated through the air as Nash's shin, just above Discordant Scream's knee, simply kept going. Scream fell to the ground as one leg became incapable of handling his weight and fulfilled his name, an Aether-charged scream of pain coming from his mouth.

That scream served to share the pain the man was feeling with Nash, who stumbled back almost drunkenly from the renewed attack on his senses. His hands went to cover his ears for a moment before he remembered what to do, and he knelt on top of the screaming man, bringing his ears back into the Aether and his hands to the pale man's neck, throttling him.

Once again, physical contact brought the too-rough too-smooth scratchy, slimy, painful sensations back into his body, but this time the screams were unfocused, impotent.

These? Nash could power through them, at least for a moment.

He eased off slightly, and spoke words that he himself could not hear. "Surrender."

----------------------------------------

Once again, he washed the wraps he had worn and the blood-splattered clothes in his bathroom. He heard the sound of footsteps outside the door, and his heart started beating like he was looking down a tall canyon with no rail between him and the fall.

The footsteps kept going past his door. He sighed in relief.

----------------------------------------

A knock at the door interrupted Nash's workout.

He looked up from the ground, the four large weights still balanced on his back as he held a plank.

A shot of fear lanced through his body before quickly being pushed down and quickly replaced by annoyance. He sighed.

Slowly, he extricated himself from the assembly of weights for the first time in the past ten minutes.

All the while, the knocks at the door grew more frantic, him ignoring them the best he could while hiding the weights behind the curtain concealing his bed.

He wiped off his sweat and opened the door.

"What?" he asked, more than a little frustration sneaking into his voice at the interruption.

The person standing across from him - or, rather, persons - was his bird-like landlady and someone he didn't recognize off hand.

As always, the old lady's face was drawn tight, both by a tight bun and a scowl. "You have a visitor," she said, her reedy voice curt. "He said you knew him. Now, unlike you two, I don't have all the time in the world to faff about. I'll be off; I have more productive things to tend to."

She walked away, muttering under her breath curses against the laziness of the new generation.

Both of them waited for her to walk outside of hearing distance. Nash was the first to break the silence, turning around to face his visitor and regarding them curiously.

"And who might you be?" he asked, looking up and down the stranger.

The stranger was a young man around Nash's age, oddly wearing what seemed to be the garb of a blacksmith. Thick fire-resistant boots and an apron stood out the most, with a pair of leather gloves stuffed into the pockets of the apron. A faded white long sleeve shirt was tucked into his jeans*, and the pants were in good condition but with a few stains from near-miss burns and soot.

A faint smell of many different kinds of smoke came from his clothing, the scents of burning coke and propane chief among them; however, the scent had many more industrial nuances, including subtle whiffs of burnt carbon steel and welding rod flux, that being mostly from SMAW processes.

He was smiling, as he had been the entire time - Nash couldn't tell whether it reached the eyes or not.

"An interested acquaintance-to-be," the smith replied, his smile never leaving his face. "The organization I serve makes it a policy to remain neutral on these matters - and I certainly mean to keep that course - but my curiosity simply would not let me move on without speaking to you. May I come in?"

For a few seconds, Nash considered his options silently. Obviously, the stranger knew who he was, so bringing him into the apartment would be dangerous; perhaps, though, not as dangerous as having the inevitable discussion in the open. Plus, he hadn't cleaned.

In the end, Nash decided to have the discussion inside his apartment, if only to muffle the sounds of the fight likely to occur shortly.

"Come in," he said. Political training, rusty but ingrained deep enough to rise to the surface immediately, helped him play the part of gracious host with minimal begrudging. "Forgive the mess. I was not expecting visitors."

"Do not worry; my time in the forge has long desensitized me to such things," the smith said, stepping into the room, Nash closing the door behind him.

In reality, it wasn't that dirty, but it would certainly be considered almost slovenly for the Emerald household; a recently washed skillet had been set out to dry on a cloth, a notepad was splayed open on the table, and the chairs were all askew around the table. Nash closed the notebook, shoving it to the side, and gestured for the other man to sit down.

"Tea?" Nash asked, stopping in front of one of the plastic tubs. "I'm afraid all I have is rather cheap, tea and teaware both."

"Not right now," the other man said, smiling. "Maybe later. Just some water for me, I'm afraid - it's no good to drink something as delicate as tea after too long in the forge.*"

Nash complied, bringing out two glasses of water from the filter set on the counter by the sink. The smith took his and drank it in short sips, considering the flavorless liquid for an unusually long time, like the simple act of drinking water was a novelty.

The Emerald scion sat down across from the smith. He waited until the smith had set down his cup before he asked his question, which took a few too many tense and awkward seconds.

"I apologize if I overstep, but given the circumstances I have a few pressing questions," he said, his face and voice both schooled into the perfect picture of politeness. "May I ask of my guest who he is, why he is here, and how he has found me?"

The smith, still smiling, spoke. "I shall answer your queries in reverse, since that is the easiest order for both of us."

He rose up a finger before looking at it quizzically, as if wondering if he was doing it right. He seemed amused by his attempt, though Nash could not tell why. "My host's final question is the easiest to answer, as there is nothing I can tell you about how I did so. I am bound to not leak my Sect's capabilities."

"I understand," Nash said, his smile strained but the difficulty of maintaining it not showing. "I simply wish to know whether whatever technique you used will lead my other, less understanding pursuers to me."

The smith reared back in offense that would look more genuine if he didn't have that same look of amusement on his face. "I would not be so crass, especially in a matter so trivial as to satisfy my curiosity. Do you think so little of me?"

His smile turned from passively amused to a more active amusement, like one let in on a private joke. "Onto the middle question. I am here to satisfy my academic curiosity. One of my clients, one who had a problem with a rather low-grade crystal as far as I recall, has been exhibiting interesting behavior focused on you."

"What type of behavior?" Nash asked, taking a drink from his own cup.

"It started with the standard stuff - some backwater gang leader yelling at me to fix his shiny little toy that belongs in the garbage. It became more interesting when I found out that he had managed to bond with it in a primitive manner, and unconsciously consumed it to further his cultivation. Evidently, this distressed him."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"Well, I was passing through the area once again and he demanded that I stop by. I humored him, and saw that the rate of the consumption had drastically increased. He was already obviously unstable, even to my inexpert eye, but now he has become much worse. I told him there was nothing I could do for his trinket." He picked up his glass, swirling the water and regarding it with his unchanging amusement.

"I asked his second-in-command - sensible little fellow, much better than his master, not that you care - and came by some interesting information. Somehow, you had angered him to such a degree that his cultivation suffered, and he subconsciously accelerated his consumption of his 'treasure.'"

The smith took another drink from his water, once again marveling at the tasteless liquid. "I was wondering exactly what type of person could destabilize another so much, without even meeting him. So, here I am."

Nash leaned back, setting his cup down on the table and pushing it to the side. "I'm afraid I have never met this person. I did have an altercation with a few gang enforcers from the Crimson Bonfire Gang, but I am not aware of whoever you're speaking of."

"That's the fascinating part," the smith said, his eyes a-twinkling. "If you two had a rivalry of some sort, had fought personally or knew each other somehow, then I would be unsurprised. No, Emerald - what I am interested in is how you did so without meaning to, without even meeting the other fellow. He is incensed rather easily, but it is still a curious situation."

"Hm," Nash considered, his fingers tapping on the table. "I'm afraid I can do little for you on that front - I was not even aware of this man an hour ago. Now, if you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by Emerald?"

"Oh, are you not? Perhaps I misread, or you're just lying. Either way," the smith said, somewhat giddily, somehow equally delighted in either option. "Well, either way, your cultivation seems somewhat like that clan's, to my memory. They made something of themselves here, right? A big regional power nowadays, I've even heard."

"Yes," Nash said warily, dragging out the word in consternation. "Senator Emerald is in de facto total control of politics in Wolf Country, and is in the upper echelons of personal power."

"Good for them, good for them!" The smith finished the last swig of water and stood up immediately to refill it. "My, they've really come quite a ways! I can even remember them in their early days, inherited from the main body. They weren't quite the power they are now, of course," he said, his voice jubilant as he refilled the cup of water with machinelike precision. "I think they were a lesser noble family under the Emperor that used to rule here? Whatever happened to him?"

"We killed him," he said, his confusion building. "I'm sorry, are you implying you were alive before the rebellion? Also, what do you mean by 'main body?'"

The smith froze. "Ah. I always forget that other people have a different knowledge base than me, probably due to my age. Luckily, that ties into the next question!"

The smith finished filling up the cup and slid back into his seat faster than Nash would be able to cross half that distance; he didn't spill a drop. "Personally, I'm only two years and six point five months old. The main body I come from, however, is much older and much more powerful."

"What." Nash was surprised enough that zero emotion went through his voice, which had turned completely flat in the ultimate expression of his confusion.

"It's hard to explain, and what little this offshoot comprehends is mostly a secret of our Sect." The smith's smile didn't waver, and no hostility showed in his friendly eyes. "Suffice to say, the main body I budded from is cultivating conventionally in the secret realm of the sect. By means which I cannot reveal to you, his emotions were split off into separate entities with partial memories of his life and our mission."

The smith continued. "These split-off emotions - of which I am Amusement, which shall suffice as a name if you wish for one - are sent off into the world to cultivate and grow in knowledge, each practicing a different craft. Once one of us reaches the Ninth Calcification realm, we return to the sect and continue training in more orthodox methods. Once all of us - or at least all of us that survive - return, we are destroyed and are rejoined into the whole, preparing the main body for entering the Body Destruction realm with minimal risk."

Nash's eyes widened, despite his political training. "What realm are you currently?" he asked, deciding his curiosity on the finer points of the technique were not worth his life.

The smile widened. "Why don't you check?"

He did. His Greater Luminiferous Vision was activated with an ignored itch to the back of his eyes, and he stared straight into the channels of the man before him. For a second, they appeared unremarkable; probably the later stages of First Calcification at most.

Something about them was odd, though, and he looked closer.

More than a cursory examination of the channels revealed that they were oddly flat, and a closer look than that revealed that those channels were false, useless blanks inscribed on the surface of a sphere of liquid metal. Tendrils of liquid metal extended from the sphere like an octopus made of mercury, flowing slowly and wrapped around the Aetheric location of every bone in the smith's body.

Every single one of the bones had an Etching on them.

"How?" Nash said, his voice trailing off into awed silence. "How is... How are all of your bones etched?"

A knowing smile replaced the other smile on Amusement's face. "Well, I was made from scratch. There isn't much point in limiting me to only one, or only on the outside of my bones," he said, a sense of pride permeating his every word. "It would be a lie, however, to say it wasn't difficult to keep track at first. Well worth it, of course, since I can effectively never run out of Aether. Perfect for a smith such as me."

"And that cultivation concealment technique?"

"Nothing to mention; it's just a low-grade technique of my Sect designed for Metal cultivators such as myself." He obviously saw what Nash was going to say, and decided to preempt it. "No, I will not disclose any techniques or give any advice on them."

"Very well, that's more than understandable," Nash said, quite disappointed. "Is there anything I may help you with, Senior, or is that all?"

"Nothing for now," the cultivator with the unfathomable backing said, his lips quirked in a smile as always. "Though I may drop in once in a while, if you remain interesting. Oh, and you can do me one more favor. Rather, you will do me one more favor."

"And what might that be?"

"Speak nothing of this to anyone. Your life depends on it, junior. Goodbye, Emerald."

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Nash sat on the ground in the dark, troubled. He couldn't sleep.

It felt like anybody could find him and barge into his life at any time; if some unfathomable cultivator could just take interest and show up out of nowhere, then how far away could his family really be?

How far away could that other threat, the Crimson Bonfire Gang, be from attacking him if their Boss was really so angered by his existence?

He lifted himself off the floor with his hands, suspending his body in midair.

In his lap, all of the weights he owned were nestled to increase the resistance of the exercise, but the physical exertion did little to soothe the fear.

Sure, he had handily won the last altercation with the Crimson Bonfire Gang, but that was mostly First Calcification juniors with a single Second Calcification, and even then he had to run away in case they stopped underestimating him or his family found him through that.

His muscles shook slightly under the strain, and for once he could feel a burn from exercising this way. Was it him holding it for so long, or was he simply exhausted?

As a Second Calcification cultivator, he could probably go two days without sleep with minimal effects, but his muscles still required rest to function.

He could still remember the absolute fear he had felt when Amusement had recognized him so offhandedly. He had been glad he was sitting down, since the adrenaline (already coursing throughout his body) had rushed to his legs all at once, the adrenaline dump leaving them feeling stiff and strained despite them not being in use; his shrapnel scars had begun to itch, and he was dripping with sweat.

Thankfully, the smith hadn't noticed, though Nash doubted he would even care - was it even possible for him to feel emotions other than his namesake? It sure hadn't seemed that way.

The smith had always been amused, seeking amusement, or both.

Nash lowered himself to the ground and stretched his arms, the disorganized pile of weights still sitting on his lap.

Abruptly, he stood up, sliding the weights off and lowering them onto the floor just slowly enough to minimize the noise. One of the smaller ones hit the floor and rolled away, making him wince; it was too late at night for that to be an understandable mistake. He arranged the rest and ignored it the best he could for now.

He took the notebook and flipped to one of the few clear pages that were left, jotting down more mad scribblings in his frankly unhinged notation.

Fourteen minutes later, a full page of notes filled the page, and more; small lines of the scribbles curved around other sentences, short lines marked down to demarcate them, while others were scrawled at angles, upside-down, in the margins, even crossing with other lines like a demented game of Scrabble*.

Notes on half-remembered family history cross-referenced (and sometimes quite literally intersected with) diagrams about the use of Materialization techniques (and a few structures Nash had tentatively dubbed Inverse Materialization techniques,) while speculation on the nature of Amusement's home sect weaved in between both; his phone was opened to an online encyclopedia*, skimming dozens of poorly-sourced articles about the history of the Wolf Nation before the rebellion, looking for any reference to the Emeralds that wasn't scrubbed squeaky clean and polished to a mirror shine (though for a deep dive on that, he'd need the actual Emerald Archives themselves) and for any sign of a powerful sect with cloning abilities.

If Amusement hadn't been lying - which was definitely possible - then his Sect had the techniques and resources to somewhat consistently produce Body Destruction realm cultivators, something nobody in the Wolf Nation, perhaps even the entire world, could boast.

Nash knew that the last time a cultivator had broken into the Body Destruction realm (at least publicly) in Wolf Nation had been over a century ago, and even then they weren't particularly powerful; his father had strongly implied that he was a factor in that cultivator's death, in fact.

But with the knowledge of the smith, the off-handed comments, whatever he could get from that terrifying unintentional teacher...

Could he reach the top? Could he break into the Body Destruction realm?

Could he go further?

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A cheer rang out through one building in the Emerald compound, rebounding off of cubicles and channeling through the spacious halls.

When it was heard, many stood up despite their exhaustion and headed to the source, curious; whenever they arrived, they, too, began cheering in tired voices. Many were dehydrated, most were over-sugared, and all of them had enough caffeine in their system to kill a mouse the size of their hands.

Hobbling through the halls to the source of the sudden cacophony of unexpected joy, Beryl Emerald eventually stood just outside the cubicle, looking in. He failed to understand what exactly it was that the computer programmers, all of them fractions of his age, had uncovered that excited them so.

Soon enough, one of the programmers noticed his plight and walked over to him, guiding him closer to the screen and gesticulating excitedly.

"See that?" they said, pointing to a long string of numbers and a blinking text cursor at the end of a terminal window, all things Beryl had no context for. "That's the identifying string. We can load that into a new tracker on our end and find out wherever the Young Master is being kept."

Beryl's lips quirked up into a smile, though his eyes were set with guilt.

He would bring back the Young Master. He would restore the Senator's trust in him, and he would show the child where he belonged, no matter what Nash thought of his home at the moment.

It would pass - it had to. Nash had no choice.

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A vine capped with an eye wormed its way through the water pipes of a cheap apartment building, undulating its way out of the sink of one particular apartment.

It was deep in the night, nearly to the morning. The only occupant slept fitfully, their burst of mania spent in the notes sprawled across the table.

The eye-vine went further and further, extending even more, stopping just above the counter.

The eye burst like a water balloon smashing against pavement. Unlike a water balloon, however, the gel of the eye and the stationary nature of the popping meant that all of the gel dripped out onto a specific part of the counter.

Within the disgusting soup of sap-like vitreous humors was a simple index card. On the card was a handwritten note.

The now eyeless vine moved blindly through the apartment, going by simple touch and the old man's memory of the layout, from what he had seen before the note was deposited.

Growing along many different fixtures of the apartment, it weaved through chair and table legs, under the counter, behind the fridge; eventually, it reached what it sought, brushing against the polyester outside edge of the occupant's backpack.

Carefully, the very end wrapped around a small circle of plastic, nearly indistinguishable from the backpack it was pinned to. The vine pulled it off.

It receded. Soon, it was gone from the building altogether, the tracker dropped in the parking lot nearby. Another eye had already begun to grow from the vine; now, it was the size of a grain of rice, but it was still growing.

Old Man Looking-In prepared tea for himself in the Unleashed Vine Martial Academy. He felt a twinge of pain across one particular nerve and smiled, redirecting the vine to where it was more useful. It had completed its mission.

All else was up to Young Greenstone from here on out.