After his speech, the master of the academy addressed the questions of several of the remaining instructors and some of the upperclassmen. Their conversations were characterized by Furui’s certitude washing out the doubts and fears of those that came to him. Sunwhisper intended to ask for a private audience, but he was saved the trouble, as Furui gestured for him to approach, dismissing the hanger’s on.
“Walk with me,” the eagle-eyed man said, taking in the hunk of metal Sunwhisper carried at a glance. Ogumo scuttled behind him, while Karasu waited with Janna and his other two disciples. “I am glad to see you are unharmed.”
“And you, Elder. Your transformation was the turning point of the battle.”
Furui nodded, taking the point as the matter of fact that it was. They reached the edge of the crowd, and followed a staircase toward the grand master’s private chambers. “They came in search of treasures, and they were repelled, but it was not without cost.”
“Treasures, elder?”
“The storeroom beneath the academy. I guarded it myself until I was called for above, and it was nearly breached in the intervening time.”
Sunwhisper had never seen the treasury, but he knew that much of the Azai clan’s wealth in elixirs and cabochons was kept beneath the academy. The disciples of Titanus had been motivated by more than the potential for recruitment after all. “Who defended it in your absence?”
Furui waved away his question. “Are you aware of your former benefactor’s involvement? “
“I saw her,” Sunwhisper said. “She has not changed so much.”
“Perhaps,” Furui grimaced. “Our enemy tested us tonight.”
“This is a piece of their armor,” Sunwhisper held up the pauldron. “These artifacts are the secret behind their advancement. With some time, I think I could design a counter for them, but tomorrow is too soon.”
“Be careful with that,” Furui said, “such treasures can be seductive in their way, but the cultivators I saw were all full of poison, and that metal was its source.”
“Their bonds were weakened,” Sunwhisper agreed. “They cannot summon weapons of the shining souls.”
“As you say.” They stopped in the stairway, and Sunwhisper noted a shattered brick in the wall behind the elder’s head. It was not the first sign of the fighting he had seen inside the school, but whatever had happened there had left no other marks. Furui reached into his inner robe and drew out the Blinding Scarf. It was unchanged from the last time Sunwhisper had worn it, by all appearances a simple garment, hiding its own power.
“This is yours, I believe.”
“Thank you,” Sunwhisper took it. “Did Shishio give it to you?”
“I found it on his body.” There was no emotion in the statement. Furui had faced death a thousand times, and it was no more to him than the turning of the leaves in autumn. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask for its return after you were given your position here.”
“It wasn’t my first concern.” Sunwhisper said. He hadn’t wanted to antagonize Shishio any more than necessary, and without Starscream hiding in his chest, there was less of a need to disguise himself from cultivators who could peer within.
“Raibu and I have discussed your nature at length,” Furui said. “No one else knows what you are, and no one should know.”
Sunwhisper held very still. “Elder?”
“Demon,” Furui shrugged. “It is an unhelpful title. It doesn’t matter where you came from, as long as your presence here is of benefit to the school.” The words were reassuring, but Sunwhisper sensed the threat implied beneath them. If not for his status as a young sage, he would have been purged from the school the moment they had realized he wasn’t human.
“How long have you known?”
“Raibu noticed it first. We discussed the possibility that you were a zaibatsu spy, but I have had dealings with their kind before, and you are not as they are, not a subject of flesh craft. You have no flesh at all, though a mana body is barely flesh to begin with, some would say, so the distinction is not too noticeable. It may be that there is something in your nature that allowed you to find your new path. Sometimes, it is only an outsider who can see a thing clearly.” His words were soft, but his eyes were inhumanly hard. It was not difficult to imagine that someone who had reached his stage of advancement would have a broader sense of what constituted humanity than a new cultivator. The longer a sacred beast was allowed to develop, the more human it became, and the longer cultivators practiced their arts, the more they had in common with their bonded beasts. “When you returned to life, I asked questions of those who would know, and called for the clan records of Fringe Town. They lost their border guardian before they were overrun. Did you kill him?” Furui waved a hand. “I don’t care. What matters is that you are here now, and you will serve the clan to the best of your ability. The fact that you were not born in this world, should it become known, would only complicate matters. We have a new sage, and that is all the sects will hear.”
Sunwhisper wrapped the scarf around his neck. “I understand,” he said, “and I appreciate the wisdom of your discretion.”
“Good.” Furui glanced again at the pauldron. “Study it if you like. You will be at my side when we travel to Fringe.”
“You want to watch me.” In context, Sunwhisper was not surprised to hear he was not completely trusted.
“To watch you, to protect you, to see what you are capable of.” Furui smiled, but there was nothing of joy in it. “Wherever you came from, you belong to the Azai now, and you will serve them in glory, or meet your end in disgrace. I believe you have a great future here, once the traitors are all dealt with.”
“Will the clan be sending anyone else?” Preventing the disciples of the dragon from recovering was one thing, but it was the same for the academy. There would be no time to gather reinforcements.
“No.” Furui was firm. “It is my own students who have strayed, and it falls to me to correct them. The patriarch will be informed of my decision, but I will not ask for his aid.”
“Titanus is a greater threat than you suppose. The Spiral Dragon is like me, not of this world. He will have abilities we cannot predict. Doesn’t the clan have other fighters to call upon when they are under threat?”
“I have killed monsters before.” Furui said, a clear dismissal. “When the sun rises, the heavenly school of the Azai will go to show these traitors the truth of the dao. Those hunks of metal are a method of diverting from the celestial way in defiance of heaven, and those who resort to using them will pay the price.”
“As you say, this is a just war. Would the patriarch not be willing to help? Even another clan? The Spiral Dragon presents a threat to all of the Middle Kingdom, not the Azai alone.”
“Don’t shame yourself with such concerns.” Furui was standing a step higher than Sunwhisper, putting them at a height. He placed a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Where is the brash young cultivator who bet his life to defend the yosei? You did not wait for allies then, and we will not wait for them now. This is my decision, and I will hear no more debate. Go back to the students, and use that calming manner of yours. You are an instructor now, and they are in need of your guidance. Remember, your service to me is service to the Azai, and that is your first duty.”
Sunwhisper lowered his head, he understood Furui would not waver on this point.
“I will do as you ask.”
They parted ways, and Sunwhisper returned to the atrium. Ken and Inu had already departed for the night, but Janna was waiting for him.
“What did the master want?”
“He returned my scarf.” Sunwhisper scanned the crowd, his thoughts far away from Janna, and he saw Raibu among the students with his owl perched nearby. Whatever had occurred to destroy his tower had left him with a large burn on the side of his face. It was visibly undergoing the process of regeneration even as he was engaged in conversation, a scab was forming over the wound like skin forming on top of a soup.
He approached the elder with a bow, and the conversation paused.
“Apologies for the interruption,” Sunwhisper said, “but given how little time we have before we set out, I need your expertise as soon as you are available.”
“How can I help?” The old man’s face twitched in discomfort, and his mustache swayed. Now that Sunwhisper knew Raibu at least had an idea of what he was, it seemed prudent to enlist the scholar for the sake of his research.
“This,” Sunwhisper handed him the pauldron, “We need to understand what they are doing to themselves if we are going to stop them.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Raibu ran a hand over the ridged metal. “This is fascinating. My laboratory was destroyed, one of the traitors came for my crystals and triggered the defensive wards, but I would be happy to spend a little time with it nonetheless.” He excused himself from the students, leaving the atrium with Sunwhisper at his side and Janna trailing after both of them.
“I saw them wearing these, but they took their dead with them when they fled. I didn’t think we had any subjects to study.”
“No subjects,” Sunwhisper said, “only the metal.”
“Still, it is something.” They chose an empty classroom to use, the three of them standing around a table with the pauldron on display like an animal prepared for dissection.
“Are those scripts?” Janna asked.
“In principle,” Raibu mused, “but they aren’t like anything I’ve seen before.”
“It’s an inversion,” Sunwhisper explained, “they don’t draw mana from the environment. They break down the body of their bearer into energy and use it to power the path techniques.”
Raibu’s eyes gleamed as he caressed the tails of his mustache. “How do you know that?”
“Some of it, I sensed through a spirit link with Empiti. The rest is deduction. The Spiral Dragon offered them great power at a great cost.”
Janna looked troubled. “Half of Fringe Town would drink from that cup.”
Raibu chuckled. “Only half? Either they are very wise, or very cowardly. Such a promise is the dream of artists who have reached their limits. For those who will never know immortality, a few years of power is worth more than a dragon’s still beating heart.”
“A few years?” Janna could only be thinking of her brother. “Do you mean it will only make them strong for a few years?”
“If Sunwhisper’s supposition is true, it may be less than that. Cultivation is the process of drawing the soul of the world into our own bodies until there is no distinction between that spirit and ours, only a difference in expression. Our bodies are replaced, refined, and the strain is great, but there is always more to draw upon and recover for ourselves as long as we do not stray from the true path.” The scabs on his cheek were already peeling, and fresh pink skin was on display beneath, as if in demonstration of the principles he described.
Sunwhisper made a sign, and used a magnetic pulse to pull the pauldron into his hand. “These artifacts cut them off from every bond but the one they make with the Spiral Dragon, and it doesn’t know how to heal, it only knows how to transform. It turns all it touches into a version of itself, an extension of its hunger, and it devours them as it devours everything.”
Ogumo was happily exploring the ceiling, but he paused long enough to rasp out a word.
“Hunger….hmmmm.”
“What do you know of the so-called dragon, eh?” Raibu raised an eyebrow.
“It is not of this world.”
“Like you?”
Sunwhisper nodded, and Janna looked between them in confusion. “He knows?”
“I only know that our young sage was not born a human,” Raibu explained. “When he returned without the scarf, I was able to sense the structures inside of him. Much of his body is crystalline, and I have spent my life in communion with crystals. It was Furui who suggested that you were a visitor from the Tree of Heaven. Rare enough, but you would hardly be the first to settle here.”
“The border guardian protects us from demons,” Janna said automatically, and then looked sheepish. “I mean, how could others have settled here? Visitors are stopped at the border.”
“Not all of them, and not at all times. There was a period when the Middle Kingdom was more welcoming to demons, because they brought with them knowledge of other worlds and technologies that could be of benefit to the Blessed Lands. That was long before my lifetime, and enough visitors caused enough strife that they were no longer welcomed. Demons are weak because their cores are weak, if they even have a proper core. But they sometimes were able to advance quickly, or in unexpected ways, once they were allowed to learn the pure arts. Most of them were hunted down over the centuries, though that is not to say that there might be others like you surviving in the world.”
Starscream was one example of how something like him could slip into the Blessed Lands and carve out a niche for himself. In the year he had spent with the yosei in the Hylian mountains, Sunwhisper had found no evidence of his erstwhile passenger’s death or survival. That being the case, survival was more likely. The Red Spider would not have given up easily, and he had doubtlessly rewoven his battery somewhere far away from the academy. The Middle Kingdom was more dangerous than the edge of the world had been. He wouldn’t be able to handle three-star cultivators on his own, but he was smart. More than smart, he was cunning. If there was a way to survive, he would find it. Maybe he had gone back to Jigoku to reclaim the mechanoborg parts they had left behind.
Were there others then? Not from earth. Orobos had sent two exploration teams, as far as Sunwhisper knew, and the Spiral Dragon had followed after. But there were other worlds on the Tree of Heaven, and perhaps other beings that had invented a means of bypassing the Ataxian Barrier that separated all possible realities.
“This Spiral Dragon,” Raibu said, bringing Sunwhisper out of his thoughts, “what are his weaknesses?”
“It has none. We came to Hollow in search of a weapon that would be strong enough to destroy the dragon, and now that it has come here, it is inventing magic of its own.”
“That is hardly encouraging,” Raibu spoke with levity, but his eyes betrayed how seriously he was taking that warning.
“The patriarch should be warned,” Janna said. “Master Furui is one man, there are others who are higher than him. When the Spiral Dragon causes enough trouble, the immortals will be involved. If it has only been here as long as you, there is no way it would be able to stand against the wrath of the highest artists.”
“Furui refuses to ask for help,” Sunwhisper said. “His heart is set, and I think he sees this as a personal challenge, a personal failure to be rectified.”
“You are both correct,” Raibu said, stroking his long mustache. “Master Furui insists that the academy manage its own problems. More than that, we are the Azai’s first line of defense against outside threats in the first place, so it is reasonable to expect us to pursue the enemy. If we fail, the patriarch will surely involve himself, and then it will be over quickly, but I doubt he would bestir himself before we failed in the attempt ourselves. As for other clans, they would be happy to see us exhaust our resources in a war that has not touched their borders.”
“What about the Starfox Guild?”
“They can be called upon to settle disputes between clans, but rarely intervene in internal affairs. It is an honor for the Azai to be responsible for the border, and it would embarrass the clan if it came to be said that a single demon was sufficient to bring us to our knees.”
Sunwhisper returned his attention to the artifact. He thought he could almost read the secrets hidden in the shape of the metal, and if he had the luxury of time, he would surely decipher them. But they had only one night to develop a countermeasure.
Raibu had a storage crystal, a treasure whose facets hid extradimensional space, and from that he produced something like a magnifying glass. Its silver rim was dense with scripts, and they sprang to life as he infused the item with his mana. Sunwhisper placed the metal sample back on the table so he could have a better look. It was only a moment after Raibu began examining the pauldron more closely that he drew back from it wearing a pensive expression.
“It is active,” he said. “Even now.”
“May I?” Sunwhisper held out his hand, but Raibu shook his head.
“This only functions with silver mana. You mustn't try to use it yourself.”
“I’m a silver artist,” Janna, perhaps out of a desire not to be left out any further from the discussion, plucked the magnifying glass from her instructor’s grasp and held it over the hunk of alien metal at an angle so that she and Sunwhisper could both view it. Both Raibu and his owl hooted irritably, though they did nothing to stop them.
“What is this?” Janna’s eyes narrowed in concentration.
The treasure magnified their cultivation sense, allowing them to see mana fluctuations in far finer detail than their advancement would have otherwise suggested. The pauldron was alive with the faintest traces of spirit energy, jumping and flowing among the ridges in a manner that to Sunwhisper resembled the activity of a digital brain.
“It’s communicating.” He said.
“With what?”
“You mean it’s a message folio?” Raibu snatched his treasure back out of the hand of the girl so that he could peer more deeply into the energetic workings of the artifact. “What a unique expression. Your Spiral Dragon is a genius.”
“Its intelligence is practically incalculable,“ Sunwhisper agreed, his own information processing modules operating at peak levels, interpreting the new data and attempting to formulate a solution.
“A message folio?” Janna asked. “How is that?”
“Look,” Raibu invited her to share his position over the magnifying glass. “A message folio works by taking a single treasure and dividing it into two or more physical conduits without dividing its spiritual essence. Forever after, whatever is written in one folio is written in the other as well, seemingly without the use of mana. One side mirrors its twin as if they had never been separated.”
“They are entangled,” Sunwhisper said, and Raibu nodded.
“I suppose they are, as is this treasure. It doesn’t appear to be using mana at all, but that is because the cost is being paid somewhere else.”
“Can the connection be disrupted?” If the Spiral Dragon was actively operating the grafts at a distance, then perhaps their effects could be diminished or removed by interfering with the signal?
“Only by the destruction of the object.”
Sunwhisper sent out a mental call for Karasu, bowing to Raibu and picking up the pauldron once more.
“Please inform Master Furui that I will return with the dawn.”
“Where are you going?” Janna asked.
“To the mountain, I’m afraid you won’t be fast enough to accompany me.”
Sunwhisper sprinted out of the classroom, followed by Ogumo, leaving the other two cultivators staring after him in consternation.