The stars looked down on a lone, cloaked figure walking on the dirt road in the cold night, his garment pulled around him and one hand holding his hood down against the stiff wind. He walked with a quick pace, fast enough that he probably kept himself a bit warmer for it, but not so fast that he looked to be in a rush for anything beyond getting out of the cold.

“Gods-forsaken road,” Zeno grumbled as he leapt over a thin, downed tree. “Seriously, Uraeus, why did you have to put this all the way out in the middle of nowhere? Mortals never come this way, the road is awful, and I still have to hike up that cursed mountain that Milo decided to put there and then get into the cave…”

His complaints got lost on the wind before he sighed and, glancing about, pulled his cloak closer to him and stopped. One moment he stood in the middle of the road, the next he stood two hundred feet down, puffing out of existence and back into it so quickly mortal eyes wouldn’t comprehend the rippling energy over him as he transported himself.

Again and again he sped down the road, flickering in and out of the mortal realm and traveling a few hundred feet each time he did it.

“Sure beats walking,” he muttered to himself. “So long as no mortal sees me.”

Stopping at a fork in the road, he looked up the side of the mountain that stood in between each path. Energy rippled around it, so dense that any mere mortal would be killed and explaining why most travelers didn’t come this way. Between the concentrated chi and the creatures it attracted, only the highest level cultivators would dare come this way.

Sighing at the thought of cultivators, the traveler looked further up the mountain, craning his neck and squinting his eyes until he found a dark spot only the size of the tip of a quill on its side.

Unfortunately the chi here made his teleporting ability spotty, so he chose the foot-to-stone method of getting up the mountain in favor of not teleporting himself into the middle of solid rock.

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Death by stone wasn’t the kind of end he would like the legends to record for him. That was a song more worthy of that crazy coot Milo.

He wondered where he was now. Probably schmoozing some mortal into something they would regret. Like taking an adventure into the Fire Waste with only a piece of unhammered steel to protect themselves with.

He snorted. Maybe he should be looking for Milo after all. He’d be much more successful in selling this death-mission to this young man than he would be.

Who knew crazy old birds had such an advantage in saving the world?

Breath rising in the air, he sprinted up the mountain to the dark hole, only a handful of seconds passing. He left a sparking trail behind him, but he waved his hand, quenching the smoldering stones before turning to step into the cave.

Stripping his coat off, he tossed it on a simple stone stool. Rolling up his sleeves, he breathed deep, relishing the fresh, chi-rich air. To someone as advanced as him, even a place like this held little benefit to him, but it was always invigorating to come here after being in the all-but-barren feeling places of the mortal realm.

His eyes trailed over the space, taking in the familiar inscriptions, stacks of jade and hundreds upon hundreds of raw spirit stones in the circular cavern. Each one of the abundant artifacts before him held a special purpose, one that he only could ever tap into once every one hundred years.

It was one that no one else could tap into ever, though. And that gave this place a special place in his heart, and made it one that the greater gods defended with such a fierceness that even the most hideous creatures of the underworld hadn’t dared attack it in the last four hundred years.

It also made him the ascended most wanted to target. He was in a curious position, being an ascended cultivator who couldn’t see as much as the greater god of time and the greater goddess of space, yet the one who most often could change things to fit his purpose because he saw into the future.

Frowning, he opened his eyes, a chill covering him.

He could see hundreds of possibilities, thousands of ways the next century could go.

Yet there were only two outcomes at the end of those countless paths.

Destruction. Or prosperity. There was no in-between. There was no mitigating damages.

And the first pivotal moment was in only a couple of weeks, with a washed up cultivator named Tay Berek.