Hanayumi dropped from the sky in front of him. She was holding one of Sunwhisper’s lost spears.

“Where did you get that?” He asked.

“It was knocked away during your duel, and hidden in a snow drift. You had other spears, so I think they did not look for it, yes? I found it while you hunted me.”

He accepted the titanosteel weapon, grateful to have its weight in his hand again. “I tried to find a weapon to call upon with my Ascendancy technique, but there was nothing for me to call.”

“I thought so,” Hanayumi’s eyes shone, “it is not just that I have never seen a cultivator with a skill like yours. You are the first, you are the only. You are a sage.”

“How can I be a sage if I am weak?” It was not the first time he had considered the possibility that there was no Path of the Kingdom of Wild Hearts outside of what was generated by the Cultivation System. But what did that mean for his future training, if there was no master he could seek to help him advance?

“All the sages began weak, yes? You are on a journey of cultivation, and your dao is your own. You must make a legend of your weapon so that the world remembers it, and one day, it will be called upon by your disciples, and those that come after, when no one remembers your face.”

“How does that help me now? Should I choose another weapon to call? When you were in the sky, I felt the name of a blade from the Path of the Honing Edge. I think I could use it instead.”

“No,” Hanayumi said firmly. “You have your weapon.” She pointed to the spear. “And now you must share your soul with it.”

“That seems…dangerous.”

“It is.”

“Won’t putting so much of myself into an object weaken me? What if it is taken from me, or destroyed?”

“Then it will be as if a piece of yourself was taken, yes? But that is what you must do to make your own way. If you do this, It will be stronger than any shadow of a blade, any reflection.”

“If it’s so much stronger, why doesn’t every cultivator do that when they reach this level?”

“Because it is difficult. Because of the risk. Because of tradition.” Hanayumi shrugged. “Cultivators are all mad, I think. I have not met any other sages, but I know they must have done this, given the memory of their weapons to the world's soul. That is how I know of them at all. You must open yourself to the spear as you have tried to open yourself to me. There must be a connection so strong that it cannot be broken, so sure that there is no thread between you at all, but one thing in two parts.”

His System had already given him a prompt to begin the process, all he had to do was accept it.

<<<>>>

You have chosen to generate a new impression. Please choose a weapon, and begin the process of mana override.

<<<>>>

Mana override? After a bit of searching, Sunwhisper found that this was the same term his System had used to refer to the transformation he had undergone himself. In a sense, he needed to give his spear a mana body, somehow an extension of his own. He thought back to the ritual chamber Yuyu had created for that purpose, the walls covered in scripts of the utmost complexity. He had considered them beyond his skill to recreate, but then again, he had a near-perfect memory, and Starscream had managed to build a mana battery for himself with webbing, alone in a cave. Surely, he could figure something out if he applied himself to the problem thoroughly.

The scripts themselves were not absolutely necessary to the process, they had been catalysts and controls.

“Hanayumi,” he said, “you have already helped me beyond measure. May I impose upon you further?”

“That is why I saved you, yes?”

“I think I can do what you are suggesting, but we will need a ritual chamber, and mana, far more mana than I can channel from the environment on my own.”

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She nodded, rising from the ground once more. “Follow me, and we will see what you can do.”

She led him down the far side of the mountain, to a cavern hidden behind a pair of boulders just below the snow line. The entrance was thin, but after a a few dozen meters the passage widened, breaking into a larger cavern system. Hanayumi’s wings glowed, but without Starscream’s extrasensory suite, Sunwhisper still found the darkness a little stifling. He caused his eyes to project light and saw old marks on the stone that looked to have been made by claws. There was no animal smell, however, and the cave seemed to have been unoccupied for some time.

“Will this do?” She asked.

“You have my gratitude,” Sunwhisper said. He couldn’t produce webbing to work with anymore, but he was more than capable of carving scripts into rock with a mana infused spear point. He found an area that seemed flat enough for his purpose and set to work on producing a scaled-down version of Yuyu’s transformation chamber.

Hanayumi watched him with interest, but said nothing to interrupt as he sketched out a pair of eccentric circles and began outlining them both with scripts. He wouldn’t have to do exactly what Yuyu had done, his weapon wasn’t able to infuse itself, after all. But the similarities were there. The materials that had gone into its creation were not so different than those than had formed his own bones. It was an obstacle he had already overcome once in more difficult circumstances than these.

From his memory of that event, he was able to calculate roughly how much mana he would need to properly infuse the spear, and he knew it was far more than he had in his core, or that he would be able to channel in any reasonable time frame. There were no elixirs for him to imbibe here, and no spirit fruit, only the Yosei.

“I will need mana,” he said, “far more than I can give. Can you help me when it is time?”

“How long do you need?” Hanayumi asked.

“I’m not sure, at least a day of preparations, and I should rest before we make an attempt.”

“Then I will gather the others, yes? And we will see what you have done not this morning, but the next.” Hanayumi left him to his work, and Sunwhisper lost himself in concentration. He was certain Starscream would have done a better job, but the scripts he was making seemed functional, and he ran tests after test on each section as it was completed to ensure there were no leaks or shorts.

The infusion process was not too complicated, theoretically speaking, but the difficulty would lie in treating the spear as a genuine extension of himself. He would not be able to rely on his System screens to guide him, and his cultivation sense, though greatly improved, still left much to be desired.

If it was this simple, why didn’t other three stars-infuse weapons of their own? He wished he could have questioned elder Raibu on the subject, or at least perused the library, but the academy’s resources were not his to call upon, so he would do what he could without them.

When the script circles were completed, he meditated to regain mana and rest his mind. His internal clock informed him that he had spent almost twenty hours completely absorbed in his task, and if Hanayumi was true to her intentions, then the Yosei would be arriving soon. He compartmentalized his processors so that different parts of his mind could focus on the meditations while the others rested in turn, and it seemed that hardly any time had passed when he was no longer alone in the cave.

Hanayumi was standing outside the circles.

“We have arrived,” she said. Hundreds of Snow Flowers were with her, hanging from the walls or floating in the air. Yanagi was among them.

“Open yourself to us,” she said, “and we will help you open yourself to the spear.”

Sunwhisper nodded, first forming a spirit link with Hanayumi, and then the others, one by one. Though each individual link required only the smallest drip of his mana to maintain, creating so many links and holding them open all at once should have resulted in a torrent that would drain him in mere minutes. These were not like the other connections he had made with his techniques, however, in that he did not have to shoulder the cost alone. The links were reciprocal, and the little Yosei each individually accepted some of the cost of forging the connections.

Sunwhisper had never had more than a handful of spirit links active at one time before, and the sensations he was receiving after he had bound himself to the entire group were nearly overwhelming. His mind was pulled in too many directions for him to register them distinctly, and his sense of self faded against the background of so much noise. The information he was receiving from them was clearer than it had been only a day before with Yanagi.

He felt their curiosity, their affection for each other, and their kinship. He felt their unease at the sight of so many scripts, and the strange cultivator their queen had brought among them. They didn’t have speech of their own, but they were able to communicate well enough without it. Sunwhisper suddenly knew all the best trees to climb if he wanted to properly feel the sun. He knew where there were flowers that bloomed among the ice and the taste of the nectar they produced. He knew what it was like to be a part of a family that was almost like a single body, so deeply linked that a loss for one was a loss for all, and he felt what they had felt when cultivators came from the academy to capture and kill.

Hanayumi was a bonfire among a thousand candles of feeling and thought, and her warmth brought him out of the confusing throng of other minds. Dividing his awareness in such a way that he was able to hold onto his sense of self as well as the group was taxing, but it was not beyond his capacity once he understood what was required. Hanayumi helped him do it, and before long, they were, all of them, intent on the task at hand.

Sunwhisper began the infusion.