[Attention. Attention. This is a message from your continental ruler. Disregard this at your own peril.]

[A criminal unlike any other walks among us again. You who bring him to me for execution will be rewarded.]

[The oldest among you will remember the Lord Hellbent and the havoc he has visited upon our world.]

[He is alive, though we cannot tell whether he has returned to life or he simply never died in the first place.]

[We do not know his plans. We do not know how long he has watched us all assume he was dead.]

[But we know that we cannot allow him to remain alive.]

[For all who have lost someone in the Encroach, we ask that you bring him to us to justice.]

[Or kill him yourselves, if any are capable of doing so. A corpse confirmed to be him will be rewarded as well.]

The rest of the message was a description of where they knew I'd been so far - thankfully limited to Vaz Andax - and several expected routes for me to follow. Drakebarrow didn't appear on any of them, thankfully, but that wouldn't stop the people from getting that announcement. Nothing could, not if they were within the System's sphere. Even the kids would have gotten it.

I just had to hope none of them connected that to me. If the guards on top of the barrow, who had shown themselves more than capable of beating me as I was, connected that to the person attempting to intrude on the burial site, I was done for. Just because I filled a second soulroot didn't mean that I had some mystical new power to beat them. I hadn't even gotten to the point where I could grow the full shape of a technique inside myself. Making the structure each time made me far too slow to fight anything in a serious capacity.

But I had Shadow now. Even if they were determined to kill me, they'd have to find me first. Of all the lessons Shadesoul had talked about in my last life, the ability of Shadow to slip under the attention of anyone else was something that had stuck with me. Come to think of it, I might have been able to use Shadow to sneak out of Vaz Andax if I had really cared to try. Ultimately, though, Wind was good enough to have gotten me out of there. I shouldn't be dissatisfied with it just because I'd forgotten a core aspect of using anima techniques.

Plus, there was something wiggling around at the back of my head. Some combination of Wind and Shadow I remembered hearing about in my last life, though I didn't remember the name of it. Something like flight but using Shadow instead that was only easily mastered by the people who had taken in both. If I could figure out how to make that work, I could slip right into the barrow. If a village as small as this was wasting manpower to guard a burial site like that, there was no way they'd come into it themselves. I could hide and satisfy my own curiosity in the same way.

If I could figure out how to create the proper form for the technique. I got to work, using the circle for my cobbled-together flight attempt as a base. The energy flow was all wrong for a Shadow technique. Both forms may have been ephemeral but they did not act the same. That was the first and most important thing to fix. I couldn't even test it while the flow was knotted up like that or I'd end up tearing my own insides apart or worse. I'd only met one healer in this life and I absolutely wouldn't trust her to have the skills to fix even a partial animus reversal.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I carefully recreated the intertwined channels of the technique, shifting them until the point where I'd be infusing the anima was at the relative top and the Shadow would flow down through the entire network. It wasn't as much of a work of art as the flight version had looked like, since Wind liked to swirl and gust far more than any other form and it always ended up looking interestingly complex. Constructs infused with water anima generally looked similar, but much more wave-like than swirly and distinct.

Once I was satisfied that it wouldn't cause my entire internal web to collapse violently, I took a little bit of extra time to add a few capacity-increasing pooling points into the ring. Sure, it would mean I would have to put all but a tiny mote of my Shadow animus into it, but it would save me from whatever the equivalent was to falling out of the sky with the previous version. Or at least give me some warning when I was about to run out of fuel. No haste-induced issues this time, not for me.

That done, I started shifting around the sigils within the ring. What would make a pool of Wind anima condense into a usable form would just wrap the Shadow back in on itself and send it colliding back into the rest of itself. I added that to the list of things to look into if I was able to find a library at some point. Maybe the System had generated some new sigils in the last several years. Maybe they'd even be more efficient.

I'd never missed my team of sigil researchers more than I did now. They may not have known they were looking for. They may not have been human. But they had done good work at keeping me on the forefront of new technique and elements. Hopefully some of them would still be alive - or alive-ish, or functional, or whatever their state had been before - so I could get them going again. Otherwise I'd have to test any new sigils that had been found, earned, or discovered on my own.

Why would I bother doing that? That's what servants...no, that was too kind for what they'd really been to me. That's what slaves...no, they weren't really forced to do it either. That's what indentured personnel were for. Most of them hadn't even been sentient. It turned out that golems could inject anima into things as long as someone filled their reservoirs every night. They were great at it as long as they didn't need to have any creativity.

When I'd gotten the sigils lined up, I began feeding power into my new creation. Slowly, it filled up. I was giving myself plenty of time to do all the minute corrections to correct for the small flaws that showed up. I'd never worked this closely with something that incorporated both of these animus types, but there were still enough situational oddities that I wondered if I'd lost my touch. When it was full to the brim, I let it go as a test and felt something settle over me. It was a good sign for it to have made it that far. I poked at one of the shadows to test the effect but it didn't go through like it was supposed to, instead bouncing off the surface of the shadow like it was a solid object.

I went back to the mental drawing board and revised the form. This test also didn't work, but the fact that my finger came out of every shadow instead of just one made that form worth keeping in mind so I could refine it later. The third attempt didn't come out anywhere. The fourth worked. My finger - the pinky, of course, I wasn't going to risk sacrificing one of my actually useful fingers - slid into the patch of shade I was testing with and out of the one I'd selected as a test target.

With a successful form in mind, I recreated it, infused it, and slid headfirst into a corner of shadow that was big enough to fit my body.