Starscream could read without eyes, it was just complicated. His electrostatic sense was sufficiently sensitive to detect the presence of ink, which interacted more readily with electric currents than the parchment it was written on. Doing so required intense focus, and caused the range of his awareness to shrink barely beyond the reach of his claws. But even with his electrostatic sense occupied, he could still hear everything that happened around him. In his time in the Blessed Lands, Starscream had learned over and over again that redundant systems were the key to survival.

Sunwhisper had given him a short list of topics to seek out, information on the power at the heart of the world tree, high-magic zones like the Hidden Valley, and any reference to his path or one like it. Starscream would keep an eye out, metaphorically speaking, but he didn’t really care about any of that.

He was tired of being treated like an appendage. He was, literally, an appendage, but he was also twice as smart as the emo excuse for a mechanoborg he had hitched his wagon too. The kid had a different System, and he kept improving a statistic Starscream didn’t even have. Starscream understood what EQ was, he saw what it seemed to be doing to Sunwhisper, and he didn’t approve.

The first exploration team had captured and killed a cultivator. The First Elder and the border guardian hadn’t even found out, if they had, there would have been no need for the charade about Dunsparce stepping on a sacred bush causing them all to be slaughtered. That was the nature of reality for cultivators as well as mechanoborgs. You killed when it suited you, when you could get away with it. But now the kid was talking about how he would never kill again.

This EQ stuff was like a virus making him dumber. He didn’t even know that his very existence was predicated on murder. The first exploration team had captured one of the younglings in Fringe Town, knocked him out, and dissected him while he was still technically alive. The medical unit had kept him from feeling any pain, probably, Starscream wasn’t entirely sure. They might have just paralyzed him. Whatever.

It was the work they’d done on that captive had been sent through the ansible to the second team. Without what they had done, Sunwhisper wouldn’t have his perfect quintessence organ. He’d been made after, with all of the knowledge they had acquired from the Blessed Lands. In one way of looking at it, the entire first team had given their lives so that Sunwhisper could exist.

Not Starscream, of course.

After the gold girl had left their cell, they had talked things over with Ogumo one more time. Starscream didn’t have an actual voicebox, but he could issue a few ultrasonics to help with echolocation, and the big spider seemed to be able to hear some of them. They worked out the signal for go home and hide, and other than that, he was just going to take directions from tugs on his big hairy underbelly.

When it was late enough for the castle to have settled down, Starscream rolled up his extension cord and nestled himself under Ogumo’s abdomen. Students weren’t supposed to be out of their rooms late at night, but no one paid attention to sacred beasts as long as they didn’t cause trouble. Karasu had visited more than once, and they had arranged it so that she would act as a lookout at the library.

“Good luck,” Sunwhisper said. “Be safe.”

“Will devour…knowledge…” being on the underside of the spider as it went through the weird vibrations and hair rustling that it used to replicate human speech was interesting. It seemed like the kind of operation that would require more intelligence than the sacred beast actually possessed, but Starscream supposed he could be doing it instinctually. After sacred beasts reached a certain stage in their advancement, they generally all found a way to communicate with humans. It seemed to be an unwritten law in the Blessed Lands that everything was undergoing convergent evolution all the time, heading toward the peak of the immortals.

The elder who had been in charge of the gate to the Hidden Valley had been a monkey, or a lemur, or something, just hundreds of years down its path. Far enough that it may as well have been a human pure artist. There were a lot of opportunities in this world if you knew where to look, and the library was a good place to start.

Back in Silk Flower Town, Wen Lambo had uttered two very interesting words, golem and Zaibatsu. As it turned out, neither of them were too big a mystery. Sunwhisper had asked Janna, and though she was no expert, she had at least been able to tell them that the Zaibatsu were one of the eight great sects.

The political power structures of the Blessed Lands were pretty twisted up. There was some kind of council of immortals in Jade City, the capital of the Middle Kingdom, that had ultimate authority. The Starfox Guild was a legally distinct entity that acted as a kind of police force and regulatory body, but apart from paying taxes and following rules about tattoos the clans mostly ran themselves. There were about a thousand of them, and the smaller ones, like the Soga, got extorted by the larger, regional clans, like the Azai. But the big clans usually weren’t entirely independent either. They owed some kind of fealty to the eight great sects, and it was the sect leaders who made up the immortal council.

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Starscream didn’t care much about any of that, it was just that the sects were elementally themed, and the Zaibatsu had gone the farthest down the paths of metal. They made golems, which from what Janna had described, sounded a lot like magic robots. If Starscream could learn more about how they did it, there was a chance he could make a new body for himself.

No more tagalong. No more emo mechanoborg still worrying about Earth. The kid had never even been there, and it was probably gone anyway. If the Spiral Dragon was on Hollow, then that put some real time constraints on things, but Starscream could deal with the existential threat to the universe after he had his own pair of legs and a functioning quintessence organ. The way things were going, he definitely couldn’t trust Sunwhisper to take care of everything. What was he going to do, take the Spiral Dragons pain away? Make it sad?

The Spiral Dragon was an intelligence every bit as vast and powerful as Orobos himself, even moreso, if it had won the war. Dealing with a problem on that scale didn’t call for a little infiltrator droid, it called for an engineer.

Ogumo climbed along the ceiling all the way to the initiate’s library. It was an impressive collection by pre-industrial standards. Thousands of scrolls and folios, all of them inscribed by hand. But there wouldn’t be any real secrets out here. The librarian's main job was to keep students out of the restricted section, which was secured behind a latched gate.

The gate was simple, just iron bars and no real lock, but the wards were not. Starscream had seen them through Sunwhisper’s eyes, but his own senses were in some ways superior. Mana was not electromagnetic, it ran on an entirely different spectrum, but in the time Starscream had spent in the Blessed Lands, through his experimentation with scripts and the cores of spirit beasts, he’d been able to augment his sensorium to the point where he was almost as good at reading mana as Karasu. He hadn’t shared that ability with Sunwhisper. Just because they were working together for now didn’t mean they had to share everything. Besides, merely having a mana body meant that Sunwhisper was going to gradually get better at reading the flows of spirit energy in the environment and other people as a matter of the natural course of development.

Starscream didn’t have that luxury, and he’d had to survive on his own for a long time before the kid came around.

Ogumo paused in the center of the ceiling of the main room. They both heard the rustle of feathers as Karasu arrived.

How the raven flew at all with three sets of wings was an anatomical miracle, but she managed to do so with aplomb. She alighted on the back of a wooden chair and gazed up at the spider.

“Nothing to see.” She had checked the other halls. A few of the older students were tasked with being hall monitors, and they had passed one on their way to the library, but they usually stayed closer to the dormitories.

Ogumo waved a foreleg at the raven and crawled the rest of the way to the gate. Starscream extended his senses as far as he could into the room beyond, no movement, no life at all that he could discern. He’d already stored a copy of the wards in his long term memory, gone over them in his mind a dozen times before they came, but in the end, there was no need for him to try and match wits with whichever instructor had put these scripts in place.

The gate simply wasn’t designed to keep out something of his size, so he crawled through the bars. It was too tight a fit for Ogumo, but the spider had agreed to wait for him outside the restricted area until his search was complete.

The second library was even larger than the first, and Starscream scuttled along the shelves, scanning bindings and label plates with a tight beam of his electrostatic sense as he went. The Hero System didn’t use the same statistical metrics as Sunwhisper’s Cultivation System, but if he had to do the conversion, Starscream considered it a conservative estimate to say his own IQ was well into the fourth star class. When he found what he wanted, he didn’t have to steal it. He was able to scan the entire document and commit it to memory in the time it took to flip through the pages.

Karasu cawed. There was something coming. Sunwhisper’s curiosity would have to wait for another time. Starscream scuttled back through the gate and under the belly of the spider a second ahead of hearing the footsteps for himself.

It was a woman and a man. The first one to enter was Himiko, and she stopped in her tracks when she saw the raven and the spider. The man who came after pressed into her back, one hand curving around to touch her stomach. Starscream didn’t have much of a sense for faces, but he recognized individuals readily enough by other means. This was Makoto Shishio.

She swatted his hand away, but didn’t seem to be offended by his familiarity. She was just abrupt. “I recognize that spider.”

“What does it matter?” Shishio said. “It looks too stupid to be a spy.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked Ogumo.

“Restless…legs…” the spider replied.

Himiko took in Karasu’s presence as well. “Who do you belong to? I don’t recognize you.”

The raven fluffed her wings, increasing her apparent size twofold. “To nobody,” she croaked.

“You should both return to your companions,” Himiko said sternly. “There is no reason for you to be loitering here at night.”

“Leave the animals,” Shishio said, “I know somewhere else we can go.” He whispered something in her ear, and Starscream only eavesdropped a few words before tuning it out. He wasn’t interested in the instructor’s sex life, even if Sunwhisper would be.

Himiko’s stance softened, and the pair strolled back into the hall. There would be more time for research after all.