The first line of the message, the one that traditionally holds a term of address on letters and messages, was larger than the rest, adorned with curlicues and whatnot. This, fancifying the address line, is a custom centered somewhere to the east of Oristan. As it was written here in Gardene, it was actually far more subdued than I would have received on a letter written in, say, Picodi. There, they barely stopped short of spraying the ink with glitter and golf leaf.

Still, the curlicues were enough to make my wince a little on the inside. Especially since the author didn't even know my name.

Harvester, the letter began. To answer a few of your questions: I do not know your name, and in fact I know very little about you on a personal level. I know some of your reputation. You are effective.

My name is Lyu Dadais, of the Inner Names Sect. I am almost certainly the man who gave you this scroll. I will not have spoken my name aloud, as when I do, my aura tends to warp my name in unfortunate ways. There are entire swathes of my legacy that are firmly credited to such colorful names as Lyulyu Dais, Lu Dadadais, Ludai Isis, and so on. I hope you can understand why I've given up on introducing myself verbally.

I thought back. Had I heard of a Lu Dadadais in passing, a few years back? I thought I might have. Some rumor in a small town about him passing through and exterminating an infestation of weevils, or termites, or something like that. I shrugged, and carried on.

I am contacting you with the intent of employment, for the purposes of eliminating a rogue member of my sect. Her name is Aris of no family, and she has skewed our teachings to serve her cruel personal goals. She fled from our primary compound after killing several of our outer disciples, and is known to be heading west, towards the Marisalese border. She is expected to be leaving precisely the sort of trail that someone of your skills will be exactly suited to following.

If you accept this offer, we will not require the qi core of the rogue cultivator Aris. We will require proof of Aris's death, in whatever format is most convenient to you. Ask for my sect at any of the libraries in this or a nearby city, or failing that send proof through the Oristan messaging service. They provide swift and discreet service, especially regarding matters relating to cultivators. Having provided this proof, you may keep the qi core to sell as I imagine you normally do, and while I don't know the asking price of a human qi core in general, let alone one of my own element, I do know that memory qi is one of the rarer types, and that non-human memory-attuned qi crystals are often bought and sold for exorbitant prices.

If you refuse this offer, the Inner Names Sect will provide all currently known information about you to the families of every victim of which we are aware. I don't doubt we are missing some, but I think the prospect of twenty angry families, most of them poor and unpowerful but a few with broad connections. One of your victims was the son of a sect leader, which I doubt you knew, as he was greatly estranged. The sect cultivates fire and sun qi, and the leader is at least five centuries old, in the higher echelons of his ilk. The son cultivated sand and ice qi, if that helps you to identify him among your memories. The Inner Names Sect does not enjoy trafficking in threats, but we hope you understand that such measures are necessary here.

The Inner Names Sect hopes you will consider this offer. If you find our employment amenable, enclosed with this scroll is a map on which is marked Aris's last known whereabouts. Additionally, there are some practices followed by our cultivators that may be of some use to you in defending yourself against memory qi.

Below this, without any further preamble, were listed seven useful techniques. The first was to begin and maintain regular entries into a journal. Obviously, I'm doing that now. The fourth was to maintain a rhythm with one's non-dominant hand whenever possible, and keep a watch for any unexpected breaks in the pattern, as that could indicate one's perception being tampered with. It will take a while to make that a habit, but at this moment I'm keeping time consistently enough. The rest, I will bring up as they become relevant, or not bring them up at all if it may benefit me to record certain aspects only in my mind. The last line of the seventh technique butted up against the very bottom of the scroll, because apparently the scroll was shorter than Lyu Dadais had expected.

I have begun following five of the seven techniques, as the fifth is more of a long-term practice which I've had no time to set in motion, and the third requires a trusted confidant—while I do have one or two of those, theoretically speaking at least, they're very far from here.

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More immediately after receiving the letter, I came downstairs and arranged with the innkeeper for another night's stay in the Dancing Fox, which was an unremarkable transaction besides the fact that at one point, a woman at one of the tables winked at me. I am not sure why she winked at me. She may have thought I was somebody else.

From this point, I departed the inn to collect more supplies. I have heard the Marisalese border is essentially devoid of most wildlife, so I bought some preserved rations from the traveler's market, some rich and some poor. It fits within my budget to have a few meals of qi-preserved luxury food packed in with a background of low-cost, low-taste rations, and I prefer that distribution of quality over the alternative, which would be simply buying the same mediocre meal in bulk. In this case, the rich element was Pephisolan greencake, and the poor element was a locally made substance known as urithu, which is crafted by essentially stuffing a mostly hollowed-out potato full of a particular breed of ant, and frying the whole thing in oil of dubious quality. It's cheap because it can be made in bulk. I have been told it contains most needed nutrients and vitamins, and although most nutrients is not all, as is evidenced by every sleepless scholar who has tried subsisting solely on the most convenient food at hand, the rations will hopefully be supplemented by some externally obtained food.

After all, I'll be looking for a person, so I can't imagine I'll be delving that far into anywhere where there aren't any people.

In case it isn't obvious from everything I've written in this entry thus far, yes. I intend to chase after Aris. It's not the reward that is motivating me, here. I don't know how thorough Lyu Dadais was with his research, but the selling price of a non-human qi crystal in an element does not indicate the value of the corresponding human core. He was indeed correct in that non-human memory crystals are exorbitant: I once watched five northern princes, none of them poor even by princely standards, get into a bidding war over a pair of middle-rank Mindscale crystals, which of course come from Mindscales, snake-like creatures with some ability to transfer between physically existing and forcibly occupying a host's thought processes.

Obviously nobody sane wants to go out and hunt a Mindscale, but their cores can be worked into various artifacts in the vein of memory projectors, truth detectors, that sort of thing. This is known, of course, because every Mindscale crystal has the same properties, besides a scalar magnitude which is based entirely on the strength of the creature in life.

You see where I'm going with this, I hope.

Human qi cores are unique.

That's the entire point of harvesting them. A mechanism using a human qi core will by definition be unique. That's not to say that their effects are chaotic if one has the time to get used to them. Of course a fire qi core taken from a cultivator will produce a fire-related effect. But depending on the techniques, the particular thought processes, even the diet that the cultivator partook of in their life. But an experiment still needs to be conducted to determine whether the core is more likely to blast fire in a forward jet, explode into useless shards, raise its surroundings' temperature exactly to a certain temperature and then no higher…

There are a lot of options. Some of them are worth a lot. Some of them are worth less than nothing. And that's with something straightforward, like fire. I have been tasked with killing a cultivator I know nothing about, the reward for this task being a qi crystal that I am in no way equipped to properly test, let alone use, because I don't even know if there's a safe distance to protect against a memory qi effect.

Well, it can't be infinite. Otherwise memory cultivators would rule the world by now.

Then again…would the world know?

I'm going discard that particular line of thought, although I'm sure it will feature prominently in my nightmares.

The threats are motivating me far more than the reward, as I imagine the Inner Names Sect must have predicted. As I've written, I would not bet on myself in a fair fight with a cultivator. For that matter, I would not bet on myself in a fair fight with most anyone. Despite my particular career choices, I don't operate well when in pain or immediate danger of pain, especially of the physical kind. If the sect releases my information as they've threatened to do—and I don't doubt that a sect based around memory could gather that information—I will be in almost-constant immediate danger of pain, for the foreseeable future. Therefore, I will not operate well. Therefore, I will be left with little chance of recovering my career and/or my life.

It's a straightforward chain of logic, which indicates that I must do anything within my power to avoid the Inner Names Sect from following through on their threat. Since these are memory cultivators, I can't imagine their blackmail is stored in any way I could reasonably destroy.

Ergo, the only reasonable option is to do the sect's bidding. Which sets a bad precedent.

It identifies me as a willing stooge. Is that the right word in this language? Aritya, welshir, tirapiedi, vallisan, take your pick of translations. Any one applies.

Regardless of what I am, I am now prepared for a somewhat unwilling journey to the Marisalese border. I will spend the rest of the night practicing the second technique listed on Lyu Dadais's scroll, which exploits the relationship between memory and dreams. I will explain more fully if it becomes relevant. There are only so many pages in this journal. I will write more tomorrow night, at which time I will be on the westward road out of Gardene. I believe there is a village around that stretch of the road, so I may seek that out.