Chang-li was trepidatious as they entered the green-tinged corridor. For the first few minutes, it seemed like the ones they'd been in before. Then, abruptly, it turned sharply and ended in thin air. Joshi put out his arm. The whole group stopped.

Chang-li came forward, peering past Joshi's shoulder at what lay beyond. They looked out across a vast open chamber. There was no floor to be seen, just a deep blue hole. A narrow wooden bridge, little more than an incredibly long plank, stretched across the chasm. It was just wide enough for one person to stand, led out away from their corridor across the open space.

The opening was at least a hundred yards across. When Chang-li looked up, he couldn't see the top. Strung everywhere between their opening and the far side was a web of ropes, narrow bridges, ladders, and rickety stairs, spider-webbing up in all directions.

A green glow suffused the whole place, shading to blue the farther up it went. High above, he caught a glimpse of movement on the ropes and bridges, dark scuttling figures that disappeared again too fast for him to see.

“Well,” Joshi observed, “Time to climb.” He pointed across the bridge, where a ladder of bamboo lashed together with ropes leaned against the wall, leading up to a ledge.

Chang-li groaned. “Another maze. Wonderful.”

"I saw something," Shou muttered. "Something white, moving funny. I don't know what it was."

Joshi nodded. “There will be enemies as we go forward. Any of you may retreat," he told the disciples.

That wasn't quite what a real sect leader should do. Either they should be urging the disciples forward and coaching them through this, or if he really didn't think they had what it took, he should send them back. Chang-li looked over each of the disciples. Brother Stone met his eyes firmly. He gripped his quarterstaff in one rough hand and nodded. Yang looked nervous but prepared. Shou was licking his lips, his eyes darting around. He had shown little ability to combine another color of lux with his red, and there was no red to be found here.

"Shou," Chang-li said. "You need to leave."

He shook his head, eyes wide. "No, I—"

"This is not the end of your chance to cultivate. This place is not for you. Go back now, and you'll have an opportunity another day. There is no dishonor in a student avoiding that which they are not prepared for. A prudent disciple knows when to challenge himself and when to return to practice." Chang-li waited for someone to contravene his order or for Shou to protest. Instead, Shou sighed, his shoulders slumping. He bowed his head.

"Thank you, Young Master Chang-li."

"You may tell Min what we have seen, but no one else.”

Shou disappeared quickly down the corridor, scurrying away as if afraid Chang-li would change his mind.

Joshi had already turned to the narrow bridge before Shou had disappeared out of sight. He started across. The single plank bridge bounced a little but did not sag as much as a natural board would have.

"You next," Chang-li told the disciples. "I'll bring up the rear." He cycled his lux. There was still a good deal of yellow in the air. He would hopefully be able to protect them. The green worried him. None of them had any pure green techniques. He had had only limited success weaving green into his cords. Whatever enemies they faced next would be difficult. He didn't like this new environment.

He was halfway across to the other side when the bats attacked. They were an ordinary size, with wings broad as a man's hand, swooped down on them from above, their bodies infused with a greenish light.

"Watch your footing," Joshi barked as the bats came in. This was not a good matchup for him, with his mobility limited.

Chang-li had yellow lux to burn. He had been trying to wrap it in green, see if he could use that as an outer shell. But green didn't answer him the way red and yellow did. It was like trying to shape water. He abandoned the attempt as the bats attacked, focusing on defending himself with a handful of flame.

Disciple Cui was in his element, using lux to rip spikes of stone from the walls of the chamber and hurl them at bats. He could only throw two spikes at a time, and there were nine or ten of the fluttering creatures.

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Chang-li waited, sword in hand, as one approached. He swung, the bat slipped under him, and he thrust a handful of flame up into it. The flames burned away the leathery wings, revealing a green lux framework beneath. The bat kept attacking, even when its body was burned away, leaving merely a green ghost image.

Chang-li struck with his sword, cleaving through the green but doing no damage. He desperately wove another handful of yellow lux flame and injected green, letting it flow in wherever it could, then slammed his fistful of lux into the bat. This time, the green-tinged flame caught the bat's green skeleton on fire. It dissolved into a shower of sparks with a terrible scream.

All around, the disciples were struggling. Brother Stone had smashed one bat so hard; both its wings were hanging off at angles and its head was wrenched back, neck broken. The green lux outlines of its skeleton showed through where he'd damaged it, and it was still attacking him.

"They're using green lux to stay alive. Your attacks must incorporate green," Chang-li shouted.

A moment later, Joshi punched. His physical fist hit a bat square on, knocking it down, and a green illusory fist from the side smashed through, knocking its lux skeleton clear out of the bat's body. The skeleton fell to pieces as the bat's carcass thumped down onto the bridge. It didn't dissolve. Joshi roared triumphantly and directed Magen upward toward a pair of hovering bats.

Disciple Cui was struggling to imitate Chang-li and weave green into his rock spike attack, but he hadn't got the trick of it yet. A bat was circling his head, claws out and hissing. Chang-li moved to intercept it.

Chang-li tried shoving green lux into his sword, but it wouldn't go. He abandoned the attempt and used the sword to knock the bat away from Cui. Its attention shifted to Chang-li. It came fluttering to him, and he met it with a fistful of yellow-green flames, searing the skin and hair of the bat, giving off a smell of roasted meat as he cooked its skeleton from inside.

Joshi punched thin air, and high above, a second punch struck one of the bats. Its body fell past them, down into the maze below. Cui shouted triumphantly and sent a spike through one last bat's head, pinning it to the bridge and killing it.

Chang-li took a shuddering breath and shook out his shoulders, careful to watch his feet. Joshi picked up the body of a bat he had killed. He drew a knife and cut off the head and wings, then wrapped the body in cloth before stowing it in his pack.

"What are you doing with that?" Disciple Yang asked.

"They may stretch our rations. Besides, the flesh of Tower Beast is good for us at this stage. Collect yours as well."

The disciples looked repulsed. Chang-li stooped and picked up the one near his feet.

"These creatures can be damaged only by the lux they favor, or by the ideal that lux expresses," Chang-li said. Joshi frowned, looking like he was going to disagree. "That is, the orange beasts we killed with weapons, the yellow ones yielded to the elements, not just to pure yellow lux.”

“I am not sure how to wield life itself as a weapon against these," Joshi said.

"Me either. I'm just noting the fact." Chang-li itched to write this all down. He wanted to compare it to some of the notes he'd been translating from the Morning Mist sect about the nature of lux and what it truly meant to cultivate. Maybe other cultivators didn't care about such things, but he did. He wanted to understand what he was doing, not just muddle his way along slaughtering things until he reached some arbitrary peak and decided that was good enough.

They set off again. The bridge ended at a ledge. A rickety rope ladder took them up to a broader shelf. Here, a pair of bridges arced out at sharp angles across the chasm. One bridge was made of a single plank like they'd just crossed; the other, made of boards swaying from ropes, was broader but had no support ropes.

Chang-li tried tracing the bridges across and seeing where they led, but they quickly disappeared into the maze. He dropped into lux sight, cycling, calling up Mind's Wall to bind his lux sight to his core. Cords of green lux stretched away everywhere, but he couldn't tell which way might be densest.

"Any thoughts?" Joshi asked.

Chang-li shook his head. "I can't sense green lux as well as yellow."

Disciple Cui approached diffidently. "Young Masters, forgive me." He bowed, looking for all the world like a real disciple. "I overheard what you were saying. I've been practicing the technique Young Master Chang-li taught me." Chang-li had passed along all the exercises for reaching toward Mental Refinement that he'd uncovered, but so far none of the disciples had shown any particular affinity for them. "When I look out with lux vision, I see the green everywhere." There was an odd sound in the young man's voice. "It's like looking at a garden and watching it grow right in front of my eyes."

"And?" Joshi asked.

"Well, the lux there feels right," he pointed to the rickety rope bridge. "I don't understand why, but it does."

Joshi nodded. "Good enough. It seems you have an affinity for green."

The disciple looked as though Joshi had just spent minutes rhapsodizing about his skills. "Thank you, Young Master." He bowed very low.

"We'll need to find you another technique," Chang-li said. "Affinity with green often means your potential as a healer, although some of them do very well in combat with death wards. I don't have any of those translated yet," he added in a hurry as Cui's eyes widened with delight. "I did have a basic healing technique that uses yellow and green. A purging flame. I thought maybe I'd be able to learn it, but it hasn't answered me yet. Your yellow affinity is expressing itself as stone, not fire. I don't know that it'll work for you." He hurriedly explained the concept and the pattern, demonstrating it as best he could. The lux answered him, shaping itself as he directed, then fell apart. He just couldn't quite visualize how it was meant to work, and that resulted in it losing its integrity before it could finalize.

"I'll practice that," Cui promised.

"We've waited long enough," Joshi told them. "Let's continue." He set off without a backward glance along the rope bridge.