Two weeks passed.

And by all accounts, Liam knew he should be anxious and impatient. During his first days in the caravan, he had wondered what was happening back in Charville every day. Now he thought about it less and less, but sometimes the questions still bubbled up and filled him with urgency.

Had the nobles finally stopped the executions? Or had they only shifted their focus and reasoning slightly? It was naive to assume that they would have changed their ways completely. The nobility would never let the commoners live in peace.

When he had set out he had known that his road would be a long one. It would take him years, maybe decades, to finally reach the point at which he could rival the nobility. That had been hammered home quite extensively on the day of the executions.

Sometimes Liam wondered whether Marten would’ve been able to withstand the mass hypnosis effect. He was by far the strongest cultivator in the caravan. A fact that he had proved again and again.

There had been three more monster attacks since the malhuhn incident. None of them had been close to as dangerous as the malhuhn attack that night. These were always smaller and they were better prepared.

In all of them, Marten played a big factor though. The more Liam watched the man fight, the more convinced he became that he hadn’t even seen half of what the man was capable of. Still, he outshone the other cultivators by a large margin.

He was probably the biggest reason why they hadn’t lost another member to monster attacks since then. A fact which Liam was surprisingly grateful for. It was a little unsettling for him, but he was slowly growing more and more comfortable and connected with the rest of the caravan.

Despite all this, Liam wished he would see a direct comparison between Marten and Charville’s nobility though. Sometimes he thought back to the two mysterious black figures.

He wondered what had happened to them. Were they still looking for him? Now and then, he looked towards the horizon almost expecting them to appear out of nowhere, chasing him. He shuddered at the mere thought of their oppressive aura bearing down on him.

He had avoided thinking about it too much now, but why had Seekers come for him? He heard about them occasionally. Only in whispered tones and quiet tavern chatter. They were some sort of special force out of the capital and weren’t drawn out for anything.

Had they only been looking for the person responsible for the noble death? Maybe he had killed the scion of a particular influential house. Or was it maybe something else entirely? He remembered Mr Montgomery telling him how he should keep his god secret as much as he could. Did they maybe sense his unorthodox god? The thought made him even more uncomfortable.

All of these questions contributed to Liam’s underlying anxiety though. He knew he needed to get stronger, and even if he was aware it would take time, he felt impatient to finally at least start his cultivation journey.

It was at those times that Liam needed to remind himself that, even if his progress was small, he was still making some progress at least.

It had taken a while, but Liam had accepted Marten’s harsh lessons and had tuned into them. For two weeks he went through the exercises vigorously. Every morning he woke up, stole away from the caravan before even the animals were awake, and spent two hours going through his closest assimilation to physical torture there was.

He didn’t practice all this time. He didn’t lift a single card, pillow, or any other object he could find. He didn’t even cycle mana. He was too scared for the others to find out.

So his days consisted mostly of watching the scenery pass by from the back of the wagon, playing cards with his wagon mates, and training with Marten.

They hadn’t reached another town in a while, but he was excited to see what the rest of the country looked like. Especially now that they got farther away into the countryside. Or the wildlands as some called it.

The training with Marten was hard but fair. Liam was making slow progress in the body training side, most of the time he managed to finish the whole circuit with only one small break in the middle. The push-ups didn’t threaten to tear off his arms anymore and he felt the increase in strength in his day-to-day life. Even the kata came a little easier now.

The only thing they didn’t make progress on, was his mana veiling technique.

“I have no idea why it doesn’t work for you,” Marten said calmly. “You need to visualize it.”

“I tried to!”

“I don’t just mean feel it flowing inside of you, you need to feel the mana itself.”

Liam was getting agitated. He took a deep breath to calm himself and listened inwardly. As always, his mana was there waiting readily, directly beneath the surface.

He tapped into that mana and immediately felt warm. There was a soft tingle of excitement and it felt like his mind fully awakened as the energies surged through him. He was definitely feeling the mana.

“And now try to gently let some of the utter mana seep into yours. Introduce it carefully.”

Liam opened his channels to the ambient mana just as Marten had shown him to do. He slowly led them into his own mana pool, only a tiny bit, also just as Marten had shown him. Then he hit the point where things didn’t seem to work for him anymore.

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Instead of intermixing the two types of mana simply flew by each other. Instead of the outer ambient mana changing his own slightly, Liam felt his mana overriding the ambient mana. Slowly but surely the outside mana was getting attuned to him.

After less than a minute, all of the ambient mana had dissipated within him. Liam let his head slump down in frustration and once again recounted his experience to Marten.

“I really don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” he concluded.

Marten carefully rubbed his chin. “You're saying that your own mana sort of overtakes the ambient mana? Does that increase your overall mana pool?”

“Uh-” Liam paused and looked inwards. “I think so, yeah. Very slightly at least.”

“Interesting, that is rare,” the man paused. “Turning ambient mana into your own can be a powerful weapon. Even if it’s only in small doses and takes some time, it could save your ass one day.”

“I guess so,” Liam agreed. “But it doesn’t change that the masking doesn’t work.”

He had to admit that the possibility of what Marten hinted at was actually more than just a little exciting. From what the man had said that wasn’t how ambient mana should usually work for cultivators, at least not that immediate. It could indeed become quite a nice trick for him,

That didn't matter much now though, as Liam's first concern was learning to mask his mana signature. Since the incident at Bilby’s wagon, almost half of the caravan was now looking for that mysterious cultivator.

And while Liam didn’t care about most of the people looking for him, one of the other cultivators noticing his mana signature even slightly could spell a world of trouble for him. He could imagine what Bilby would do to him, he had seen those things happen before.

Liam needed to avoid being linked to that in any way possible. At the same time, he couldn’t stand not working on his skills anymore. There was a desperate urge in his chest to continue his progress.

“Are there no other ways?” Liam asked.

“It depends, there might be.” Marten paused. For a moment a heavy silence hung in the air before the man continued, his voice slow and measured. “I understand if you don’t want to share it, but knowing your god could make things a little easier here.”

Liam shook his head. “I don’t think this would work,” then he hesitated. “How could it help?”

“Some cultivators have different relationships to mana through their divine blessings. I have to admit that I’m not the most well-versed person in this, but I have known a cultivator or two in my days, maybe I know anything that could help for your particular case.”

A short silence hung between them. A soft breeze ruffled the surrounding trees. Liam took a deep breath. He didn’t want to, but he had known from the beginning that there was no avoiding it now.

“Do you know about the Primordials?”

Marten raised an eyebrow. “Vaguely, yeah.”

“So what if I told you that the god that has blessed me was one of them?”

The man looked at Liam for a long minute, then started to laugh. He soon stopped when he saw that Liam didn’t join him though. “Are you serious?”

Liam nodded and watched as realization slowly dawned upon Marten’s face. “Fuck. Which one?”

“Gravitas.”

“The primordial god of gravity?”

“The very same.”

Marten whistled. “That’s some divine blessing to carry. That changes things. It changes them a lot. No wonder the mana veiling is that different for you then. It’s like we were trying to hitch a donkey before a piece of wood and are wondering why it doesn’t roll.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Some things just work fundamentally different for the old gods, mana being one of them. Maybe we have to look at things from a different light.”

And they started doing just that. Marten tried showing Liam different ways of perceiving and interacting with his mana, taking his time and elaborating everything very carefully.

Liam was a little surprised with how calm Marten was taking the whole Primordial message. Especially considering the way Mr Montgomery had reacted. It was not every day that one claimed to be blessed by one of the extinct believed gods.

Yet Marten had at no point questioned Liam on his statement, he had simply gone with it. They changed their methods a little afterward and tried different techniques. Mostly they just revolved around different ways of feeling into his mana.

Unfortunately, though, Liam still hadn’t found a way to succeed at the end of their session. All that the experimenting had brought him was a slight headache and a feeling of frustration.

He was slumped back against one of the trees, massaging his temples. Usually, Marten left after their training, but this time Liam suddenly found him staying there.

“You spoke the truth didn't you?”

“Of course,”

“Do you even know what that means Liam?”

He didn’t know fully of course. All he knew about the god he had learned from Mr Montgomery and despite his knowledge on these topics, the man himself simply was no cultivator. “I think so.”

“I have no idea how that even happened. How and why an extinct god chose you to become their cultivator. But if what you said is true, then that just means you need to be extra careful. This is not just about Bilby’s revenge act in hunting you. Every cultivator you find might be after you if they find out that you’re blessed by an unorthodox god.”

“Why is that?”

“Quests, Liam. Quests.” Marten said gravely. “Have you ever wondered what happens to cultivators who follow a god that has been thrown out of the Pantheon or has fallen into disgrace by other means? They get hunted down, that’s what happens. There is a very real possibility that as soon as some cultivator finds out your identity, they receive a quest from their god, one which they can’t ignore.”

“Why would that be?”

Marten shrugged. “Something about the gods not liking rivalry probably.”

“I guess the content of that quest would be to hunt me down,” Liam didn’t need to ask that. He could tell by Marten’s tone what “Quest” meant in that context. “Did you ever receive a quest about unorthodox cultivators?”

"Once. It was a long time ago when I lived a different life,” Marten mused. “To this day I’m not sure what happened to the cultivator’s god or what they were put in the crosshair for. But I saw the fallout. It wasn’t pretty.”

“What happened to them?”

“They pretty much razed his whole village. They leveled buildings to the ground and killed innocents by the score. Children and women and elderly people. All just to find this guy.”

Liam raised an eyebrow. “They killed an entire town’s population just to achieve their quest? What the fuck were they promised?”

“No one knows exactly,” Marten shrugged. “But I know that the guy who managed to find and kill the cultivator is now a baron of some major municipality somewhere in the west. Don’t ever underestimate the lengths people would go to just to gain strength in this world.”

Liam swallowed and thought back to the Seekers that were after him. Now realization truly set in for the first time. What if they hadn’t been after him just because of a noble he had killed? What if someone somewhere knew about him? Knew about his god?